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Ghost — rethinking WordPress

john.onolan.org

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Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#151

Post by papsosouid »

photomatt wrote: post #70
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/

Which top 10 site is running on wordpress? And how much of it is static content being served by a cache and completely avoiding wordpress at all?

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#152

Post by pjbrunet »

voidfiles wrote: post #118
modernerd wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just open a new browser window, easy to do if your OS supports window tiling. A split-screen blog editor will take up just as much room. WordPress does have a "post preview" but it's not always 100% accurate. Opening the blog post in a new window is truly the only way to see what you're actually publishing.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#153

Post by markjaquith »

sandGorgon wrote: post #131
photomatt wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would you consider moving to a database abstraction layer ? There are many of us here who are running postgres in production already and would like nothing better than to maintain one database engine that we can run and maintain. Again - I'm not advocating that you switch the default, but if switching database engines is not your bottleneck, then would you be willing to consider that option (maybe Kickstarter it)

We don't currently have any interest in moving to a database abstraction layer. We do, however, allow you to drop in a db.php file that can replace the core database portion. That's not abstraction (you'll have to rewrite any MySQL-isms to be compatible with your DB of choice), but it is an option for people who absolutely cannot run MySQL. Microsoft wrote a WordPress plugin to do something like that: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-database-abstr...

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#154

Post by pjbrunet »

kmfrk wrote: post #81
gozmike wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Especially when you consider that there are people whose only viewport is mobile devices.

Screen size limitation is a temporary setback. After Google Glasses we'll have unlimited space. As far as the eye can see.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#156

Post by photomatt »

papsosouid wrote: post #151
photomatt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Which top 10 site is running on wordpress? And how much of it is static content being served by a cache and completely avoiding wordpress at all?

Fair question: WordPress.com. This list from Quantcast has WP.com at #16

https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites/US/1

But that only includes *.wordpress.com subdomains, and our highest traffic blogs almost always invest the money to have their own domain. We have a tag[0] to track those in Quantcast, and it's currently at 129.7M people in the US, which would place it between Facebook (143M) and MSN (98M). (Blogger might have a similar boost into the top 10, but I don't see any others in the top 50 that could have so many mapped domains.)

Of course we cache, with a publicly available WP plugin called Batcache.[1]

[0] http://cl.ly/image/081G1r2f0Z18 [1] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/batcache/

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#157

Post by Maro »

ck2 wrote: post #7

The 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…

One should be careful not to frame a new product as an engineering problem. Users don't care if it's a Wordpress fork or a rewrite. Users care about the product experience, what it delivers, benefits, etc.

Having said that, you may be right.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#158

Post by photomatt »

sandGorgon wrote: post #131
photomatt wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would you consider moving to a database abstraction layer ? There are many of us here who are running postgres in production already and would like nothing better than to maintain one database engine that we can run and maintain. Again - I'm not advocating that you switch the default, but if switching database engines is not your bottleneck, then would you be willing to consider that option (maybe Kickstarter it)

There isn't anything in our feature roadmap or our growth plans that is hindered by MySQL. At some point I could imagine recommending a drop-in replacement like MariaDB.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#159

Post by seanconaty »

dangrossman wrote: post #134
voidfiles wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Markdown isn't for bloggers, it's for developers. The average blogger has never learned an "alternative syntax" in their lives -- a word-processor-like formatting toolbar, like WordPress has, makes much more sense.

True, but markdown is incredibly easy to learn, especially with this side-by-side layout.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#160

Post by danneu »

dangrossman wrote: post #134
voidfiles wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Markdown isn't for bloggers, it's for developers. The average blogger has never learned an "alternative syntax" in their lives -- a word-processor-like formatting toolbar, like WordPress has, makes much more sense.

I found this out last year when I offered markdown support on my forum that used traditional bbcode.

I run a collaborative writing forum and, newly obsessed with markdown at the time, I figured that since users were mostly writing many paragraphs of text, they could pick up the markdown basics if a toolbar + cheatsheet helped them out. In my head, it was going to be some sort of amazing improvement and my forum community would begin chanting my name as they experienced the splendors of markdown.

Classic mistake.

Yeah, sure -- the writers could certainly grasp markdown #headers, how two linebreaks become a new `

`, and even `[]()` vs `()[]` links (with toolbar/cheatsheet help). Great! But nested elements and pretty much anything more complicated were a real monkey wrench or just plain unsupported.

Writers would put great effort into their posts (just like a blogger would), changing colors, right-aligning, center-aligning, changing font sizes. -- Things that markdown just doesn't support without some extending or post-processing that would turn into something far more confounding than the intuitive bbcode you started with.

Everyone just understands:

    [center][size="6"][color="red"]My Cat, Mittens:[/color][/size][/center]
    [img]http://imgur.com/mittens.jpg[/img]
    [size="3"]Mittens says: [i]"Meow!"[/i][/size]
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