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…
Ghost — rethinking WordPress
91–100 of 236 posts
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#92I 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…
You can still access the full nuts-and-bolts dashboard via a drop-down menu, but it's deliberately harder to find, and editing happens in the simplified area by default. I've recommended WordPress.com accounts to a few people recently; I was surprised by this change, but they - having never used WordPress - seemed delighted by the simplicity of it. This can only be a good thing, and I can see this working in WordPress.org blogs too.
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#93The whole page is images, and it's a non-existent product, it's just a theory/proposal. Buried in the text is it would be a fork of wordpress . Net is filled with that sentiment, but it never takes off: http://www.google.com/search?q=fork+wordpress&tbo=1&... If you want to replace wordpress you need a modern rewrite, not a fork. The #1 problem of wordpress (among many) is it loads every darn thing on every darn page…
There is a very popular piece of software that millions of people use today that was a fork of a large, sprawling suite of a mess of several programs that used an actual Godzilla as its mascot: Firefox.
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are those two commands?
apt-get/yum install ruby rubygems gem install rails
Rails is a great platform for building a custom web app, but it's a terrible platform for building an open-source blogging platform. It simply moves too quickly and breaks things too often to be useful for the demographic that uses WordPress.
When you're talking about web code with such an astronomical deployment to developer ratio, the advantages of PHP are magnified by several orders of magnitude. Even the perfect WordPress replacement written in Rails with elegant, featureful and performant Ruby code digitized by God's own hand is by definition a niche product that can never hope to compete meaningfully with WordPress.
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
agree, you can also clearly see this in how platforms like tumblr have "evolved" to be peoples place to share short attention-span stuff. Blogging is becoming more of a mixture of FB feeds/twitter for most people.
this saddens me. the promise of blogging for me has always been the ability to have my own printing press and know that nearly everyone else in the world had access to one as well. i'm still trying to understand how this "evolution" has actually decreased the quality of communication.
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#96Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#97I'd like to see a fork Ghost as a Rails app. Anyone game?
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#98I'd like to see a fork Ghost as a Rails app. Anyone game?
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#99Earlier 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.
Anyone that only has PHP likely also doesn't have their PHP/MySQL updated to the point that anyone should trust them.
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would absolutely be better solved by an entirely new application, written from the ground up. And the whole-page-is-images thing really bothered me too. Some nice designs and interesting ideas for sure, and knowing CSS isn't a prerequisite for being a designer, but damn, I have some doubts about the understanding of the technologies here. Which is probably exactly where the concept of "forking Wordpress" came fr…
I've been committing code to the core WordPress codebase for 3 years, so while I'm not a PHP developer - I have some idea. Perhaps one thing overlooked in the argument for fork vs new build is that there aren't a huge number of developers with the skills to make this happen who would do it entirely on an Open Source contribution basis as opposed to, say, a startup basis. Appealing to existing WordPress developers, bu…
I am one of the early contributors to WordPress (you'll see my name on wp.org's About page near the bottom), and one of the founders of the Habari Project. We started the Habari Project for many explicit reasons, but in part because the curators of the project (Automattic) were not behaving in a way that we felt was beneficial to the community they had begat. So let me tell you a little about our project:
Not only is the Habari Project an entirely Open Source platform, but it recognizes participants in the project appropriately based on their contributions, something that I did not observe during my tenure working on WordPress.
Habari employs the Apache Software License, which is more permissive than WordPress' GPL. Want to develop a plugin or theme? Is the code tainted by the GPL? In WordPress, I don't really know for sure what parts can be redistributed, if any. In Habari, you can sell your themes and plugins for profit if you want to, or contribute them back to the community -- most themes and plugins so far have been.
The passion of the Habari community for producing good, documented code has (in my mind) been one of the driving forces behind WordPress' "recent" adoption of similar policies. The quality and friendly tone of assistance I get from people who know about Habari has been consistently orders of magnitude better than anything I've seen come out of WordPress, which is a characteristic that everyone working on Habari strives to maintain in the project. One of our guiding principles has been to be a project that is useful for web development education; We've seen a lot of people join our project and learn how to code well, both in the method they use and in the collaborative environment our development often lives in.
We've accepted a policy of keeping up with as current a deployment of technology and standards as our core users can stand. We recently adopted a PHP 5.3 minimum version, and I'm pushing hard to take that to 5.4. Habari simply does not run on PHP 4, and never will because it's no longer secure. We code for HTML(5). We're using CSS3. Our roadmap (admittedly difficult to find online) includes PSR-0 and namespace adoption to more easily integrate with vendor libraries. The use of current technology and techniques is really good for developers, and a refreshing change from projects that insist on supporting every old (insecure) server architecture out there.
And I'm currently making a living (yes, paying the mortgage) deploying Habari as a CMS for clients. It is viable. It is open source.
I know first hand how long it takes to build a working product with a small community. We are admittedly behind in our implementations of some features that WordPress was able to steam ahead with due to their larger community. There are also non-dev areas like marketing where we could use some work. We've been trying (albeit weakly) to lure those kind of contributors to the project.
We had a talented designer help us with our current admin design, and one of the things people comment on most about it is how it's not as cluttered with st as WP's. I like the design you've used in Ghost because it's similar to ours, yet modernizes, and I think our community would like it, too. We've been talking heatedly about a new admin design for our next release...
Habari may not be the thing for you, but I do encourage you to take a look, visit our IRC channel on freenode, and take from it what you can. If you still want to try to bend a WordPress fork, I'm at least interested in the story of your effort and struggle. And if you want to chat about why we started over (though I think it's obvious, maybe it's not to everyone else) instead of forking, or why a new project with a handful of addons (compared to a competitor) can still be a contender, I'm happy to chat. Here we are: http://habariproject.org/