Ghost — rethinking WordPress • Hacker News Board

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#61

Post by photomatt » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:42 PM UTC

I really like some of the things John has done in his mockups here, especially on the write screen, and contrary to what he thinks ideas like this are more than welcome in the WordPress community. (For example check out the dramatically revamped media or the dozens of eliminated options in trunk right now.)

The one big mistake in his premise, however, is that only 34% of WordPress users are blogging, the actual percentage is much higher. The survey he quotes me talking about was of mostly people who make their living building WordPress sites (over 20,000) and mostly WordPress.org users. This community naturally focuses (and contributes) more on the CMS and application framework side of WordPress.

On WordPress.com, however, the vast majority of its millions of users blog, and are blogging more every day. If you visit WP.com you will see a simplified and streamlined user experience that is boldly different from the traditional wp-admin dashboard. Already we've seen huge boosts in user engagement from this new experience, and while it's a few dozen iterations from being ready I'm confident the best concepts will make their way back into WordPress core when they are ready.

But overall, I love seeing different people's takes on what the next generation of WordPress will look like, and I wish more people did blog posts like this. We've had 3 dramatic shifts in our evolution before, and the shape the next one will take is a topic that occupies most of my waking hours, mind space, and creativity. And don't even get me started on mobile... :)

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#62

Post by dylanhassinger » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:44 PM UTC

I love this, except for the part about building popular plugins into the core. That sounds like a path to more feature bloat.

Instead, what if there were a small set of plugins that were "Recommended by Ghost". They could be lightweight and specially geared for extending Ghost. But still totally optional. (sort of like Jetpack I guess)

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#63

Post by wmeredith » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:46 PM UTC

tibbon wrote: post #36

This proposal makes many good points. If I were rewriting Wordpress, here's what I'd think of: - Seriously consider redesigning the logical layout of the software. Some sort of rough MVC-ish pattern would be a huge improvement over the 'loop' in Wordpress which is almost impossible to deal with. - I personally dislike PHP, but I do see its benefits in deployment. - Make it easy to make beautiful typographic layouts.…

I'm pretty sure the, 'hand-crafted-web' look is going to require deep CSS and HTML diving anyway you slice it.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#64

Post by wolfparade » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:46 PM UTC

build this on top of jekyll or its a fail.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#65

Post by rada » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:48 PM UTC

avolcano wrote: post #42

Have to say, the most intriguing ideas I saw in the concept were the two "split view" concepts - one for managing blog posts, and one for writing posts. Has any blogging platform implemented anything like that? I know there are Markdown editors with a split view, but I don't know of any that are web-based, nor any that are integrated into existing blogging platforms. And I've definitely never seen any "manage/edit ol…

There is aero snap. There are browser extensions. You can easily have your split view today, for any website, without re-writing anything.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn97WbalJwM

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/feature...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fox-splitter/

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#66

Post by objclxt » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:50 PM UTC

johnonolan wrote: post #4

twodayslate wrote: post #2

Why is all the text a giant image? (That aside, the system looks great)

Just because it's a rough concept, and I wanted to put it out as quickly as possible rather than delaying by procrastinating about coding a layout. I actually stole got the idea for making it a big page of images from the original .Mail concept page. If there's interest - of course we could put something more professional (and machine readable) together!

It really put me off. It's not about making it machine-readable, it's about making it human readable for the sizeable number of people who are visually impaired, prefer or need to read in large print, are on high DPI devices, or even copy/paste.

It's a massive, huge step backwards. I can't even search the page. I wanted to try and read all of it, but I gave up. I understand that it's quick and dirty, but I don't really think you should throw something out for comment when you can't even copy/paste from the source.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#67

Post by mosselman » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:52 PM UTC

huskyr wrote: post #53

Karunamon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newer languages aren't? Every linux distro that matters (including BSD, Gentoo, and others with a ports system), heck even Windows, has a full Rails stack that's about two commands away from being fully set up. Unless I misunderstood what you mean, here :)

Sure, you're right. But i suspect that 95% of all WP installs are by non-techies on shared hosting, that very rarely have Rails or Python support.

Yes thats the way to create great new products. Make it easy for non-techies to get them up and running and make sure they run on shared hosting and are created in a language that beginners use to learn about programming.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#68

Post by gozmike » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:52 PM UTC

photomatt wrote: post #61

I really like some of the things John has done in his mockups here, especially on the write screen, and contrary to what he thinks ideas like this are more than welcome in the WordPress community. (For example check out the dramatically revamped media or the dozens of eliminated options in trunk right now.) The one big mistake in his premise, however, is that only 34% of WordPress users are blogging, the actual perce…

Is it safe to say that without a vastly improved mobile experience WordPress is in serious trouble?

As a huge fan of the WordPress community and what the software and platform has empowered, I'm seeing a decreasing amount of interest in blogging as my social network turns toward meme-sharing and 140-character quips simply because they're much more conducive to consumption and sharing on mobile.

It's so bad that there are startups trying to fix this like Blogstand (http://blogstand.co - our project). We know that others are attempting the same (and they should be!)

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#69

Post by skeltoac » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:53 PM UTC

johnonolan I agree with the sentiment that got you there, but not with where you went. Because if you're just going to fork WordPress anyway, all you really need to do is replace the wp-admin theme.

Yeah, I said wp-admin theme. It's not generally considered a theme but that's what it is: the core-provided view of everything you can touch when you're an admin. Try thinking of the back end the same way you think of a front-end theme.

Unfortunately WordPress has not yet devoted a development cycle to making the entire admin area easily pluggable. Any seasoned WordPress developer could hack together a plugin that hijacks wp-admin URLs and displays its own interface. Several have. Wouldn't that satisfy your requirements?

Of course none of that addresses the issues around efficiency and performance. My hope is that WordPress will finally undergo a deep refactoring to remove its worst practices even if it means forcing updates to popular plugins and themes. There is no longer a reason to fear mass defection from the community for pulling that trigger. After the initial shock the changes would be embraced and everyone would enjoy better performance.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#70

Post by photomatt » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 2:54 PM UTC

EnderMB wrote: post #34

I'd almost like to see it go the other way. WordPress is a good blog, but a poor CMS choice for anything but the most basic of websites. I reckon the "66%" that use WordPress use it for personal sites or very small business sites (1-10 visitors a day) on shared hosting. There are huge sites using it, but they seem to be the exception that proves the rule. I cannot see why people use WordPress over the likes of Concre…

Because it's easy to develop for, can scale to be one of the top ten sites on the internet, and your users won't need training to use it.

Now I'll be the first to tell people there are certain things that you should build from scratch, but the examples of what people build with WordPress can be pretty breathtaking even to me:

http://wordpress.org/showcase/