Ghost — rethinking WordPress

I run a very modestly profitable website that gets about 1k visitors per day. I'm not even an "entry-level developer", I'm not a developer at all, with only the most rudimentary ability to kludge together a little JS and php.

I chose Wordpress for the site, even though it's not a blog. In fact, creating a system where posts weren't displayed in chronological order actually took a few hours of blindly hacking at various WP functions.

The reasons I chose Wordpress over an existing CMS:

* I already know how to use WP

* There is a vast array of FLOSS themes and plugins to meet virtually any need available

* Wordpress is well supported by shared hosting and managed VPS providers (through cpanel etc.)

* It's relatively easy to get free high-level support through IRC because so many people know WP

Most of these reasons are inertia based. It would be a vast undertaking to create a CMS version of Wordpress that actually gained traction because, awkward as WP is, it has an enormous library of free existing solutions to take on virtually any problem. This quality, which the author of the article complains about, it the same reason WP would be so hard to kill. Even if your product is better for a given purpose, people aren't going to give up the advantages of WP I outlined above just for an incremental improvement in UX or speed.

All that said, I'm not sure I want a CMS from someone who uses images for text instead of actual text

http://john.onolan.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/81.png

If I'm grabbing the thesis statement properly, it sounds like the idea is to make WP more flexible as a CMS. If so, that'd be very handy.

I'm not sure how it would work logistically, but it'd be cool if admins could flip a switch (maybe in wp-config) that makes a site either "blog" mode or "CMS" mode. Sort of like what you have to do to make a site networked (i.e. multiple blogs same domain).

I like John's ideas here, and this is something that should be talked about. If John has ties back to WP, though, I would present the ideas and make a case for letting him head up design or experience. The forking thing could get way out of hand (and confuse a lot of people).

Short of that, I'd say take the Ghost name and start building your own platform. It'd be cool to see another open competitor to WP. Especially if it shared a lot of the same principles.

    > Ghost would be developed openly, and it would encourage contribution. Until
    > now, Open Source projects have often had an incredibly high barier [sic] to
    > entry for contribution, which is so complicated and convoluted that only
    > advanced-level developers have ever really had a hope of getting involved.

    > Ghost would facilitate open and easy contribution from people with different
    > skillsets to help grow and evolve the platform. Because designers and
    > developers working together to solve problems always produces a better end
    > result.

I disagree that there's an ‘incredibly’ high barrier to entry with many FLOSS projects, over and above the technical ability to read and understand what's happening in the code (which cannot be made up for through community efforts, or indeed forking). The language used in this passage presents these issues as manufactured or intended, and therefore as problems that can be fixed by simply making different decisions. But they're fundamentally issues of community, and of time/attention management on the part of the core developers, and they require extraordinary patience.

It's very easy to say "get designers and developers working together". But, as I've seen with DevOps (which is the principle of "developers and operations working together"), the phrase "working together" is often used without any understanding of its meaning.

I don't want to come across as a naysayer. But seriously, if you have the answers to the problems presented here, a lot of people would love to know.