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Ghost — rethinking WordPress

john.onolan.org

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Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#111

Post by mannjani »

gozmike wrote: post #68
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…

I don't agree with your speculation that WordPress is in trouble. Though their may be decreasing amount of interest in blogging but WordPress is still used vastly as a CMS.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#112

Post by geon »

lukeschlather wrote: post #99
huskyr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have only run across one host that didn't have Ruby / Python available, and they were charging 4x the market rate for bad shared hosting - we easily saved $15 / month by ditching them. Anyone that only has PHP likely also doesn't have their PHP/MySQL updated to the point that anyone should trust them.

One.com (big in europe) have only php support but offers unlimited network for €1.25/month. They run recent-ish php (5.3 i think).

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#113

Post by johnonolan »

benackles wrote: post #88

His argument about "No Corporate Arm of The Law" seems a little flawed. He compares WordPress to Mozilla and argues that Ghost will be more like Mozilla. Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit arm of Mozilla Foundation. They are nearly identical to the relationship between WordPress Foundation and Automattic inc. Each companies corporate arm generates revenue and reinvests those dollars and development resources back in…

Hi Ben, it's my understanding that Mozilla Corp is 100% owned by the Mozilla Foundation, and that any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation are reinvested into the Mozilla project.

The WordPress Foundation and Automattic Inc are two entirely separate entities.

You are right in saying that they share a nearly identical relationship - however this small difference is extremely key to the difference in the overall philosophies of the platforms, in my opinion.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#114

Post by photomatt »

tibbon wrote: post #76
wmeredith wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

True. Perhaps a Wordpress varient would allow for per-post CSS files. I haven't touched WP in a few years; does it have the equivalent of the Rails Asset Pipeline yet?

It's old but it still works fine, check out the Art Direction plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/art-direction/

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#116

Post by onli »

You can't make a blog-software without comments. Well, you can try, but it wouldn't be a blog anymore. Letting the most important thing blogs achieve, enabling user-comments, get in the hand of proprietary external companies is totally absurd and a huge loss.

That being said, I like the idea of a focussed blogging software. Probably because I sometimes contribute to one: Serendipity (http://www.s9y.org). And there are so many different blogengines ones out there, including Wordpress-forks, and of course some of them focus on being a blog-software instead of a cms. Heck, like so many even I wrote a blog-software for myself, based on Sinatra, cached and with spamfilter and using browserid, which is already probably quite useable (https://github.com/onli/dsnblog, though the description paints the image of something more, till now it is only an almost complete blog).

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#117

Post by cooperadymas »

sergiotapia wrote: post #83

I'd love for a blogging platform that let me use custom CSS, Markdown (because I post code all the time on my blog) and free hosting. Where is something like that? Wordpress, atrocious code support. Jekyll, too much configuration. I don't want to learn Jekyll I just want to post code. Where is the middle ground for people like me? Sounds like this hypothetical "Ghost" is just what I'm looking for. Now if someone coul…

I recommend http://getkirby.com/ (Not affiliated, but a fan.)

It's worth the $39, but you can try it on a non-public site before you buy. It's incredibly simple, powered by plain text markdown files, easy to extend, and there is a "Panel" plugin that gives a very basic backend. Very little setup since it runs on PHP and without a true database. You can also connect it with Dropbox if you have the server permissions, to make editing files even easier.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#118

Post by voidfiles »

modernerd wrote: post #92
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…

This is what the simplified WordPress.com dashboard looks like for those who haven't seen it: http://d.pr/i/xetj 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…

What made sense about the Ghost write screen was that it embraced Markdown. It showed what things would look like as you wrote them. I don't think the screenshot of the new WordPress dashboard addresses that.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#119

Post by photomatt »

krmmalik wrote: post #104

Question for photomatt if you're still reading this comment thread, and since it might be my only chance to get dialog with you. Are you considering any changes regards the stack, since many installations can have a issues with speed now (not intended as a criticism). So eg something like Postgres, or MongoDB even for the DB Backend?

Running WP.com, I'm very sensitive too the performance implications of our stack. A small percentage change in performance could mean the difference of racks of servers for us. At Automattic we've also had a peek behind the curtain of pretty much every high-scale WP installation out there.

The vast majority of performance issues I've seen are not from something intrinsic to PHP or MySQL, but how people configure them. (MySQL is especially confounding.) There have been ports to other DBs but nothing that matches the performance of regular WP with a single layer of caching, like Batcache or Supercache.

For dynamic pageviews, ck2 is correct, our biggest barrier is just the amount of code we're parsing and executing on every pageload, which a different DB backend would not change. This problem is bigger on WP.com. I think we can fix this by becoming more conservative and clever about what we load for a given page and it's something I expect to be addressed bit by bit over the next few releases. (BTW ck2 if you want to work on that, please ping me!)

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#120

Post by nwienert »

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…

Obtvse did:

https://github.com/natew/obtvse/tree/refresh

http://cl.ly/image/0m3d3k230b47

It keeps position as you scroll and write.

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