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Ghost — rethinking WordPress

john.onolan.org

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Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#161

Post by papsosouid »

photomatt wrote: post #156
papsosouid wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So, none of them? It doesn't include other domains and it shouldn't include other domains. Really, it is being exceedingly generous in that estimation already. Hosting thousands of totally independent, small sites is trivial, and does not require scaling wordpress in any significant way. Facebook is one site, all their data needs to be able to be accessed by all their software. Bob's blog and Joe's blog are totally independent, and have no need to be on the same software or hardware at all. Thus making scaling a non-issue.

I agree that using caching is normal, but the difference is the total reliance on caching. I wouldn't be impressed with google's scalability either if it were 99.9999% static pages being served up.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#164

Post by dkuntz2 »

onli wrote: post #116

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…

What do you mean you can't make a blog without comments?

Definitionally a blog is a web log, or an online journal. There is no requirement that a blog have comments. Dustin Curtis' Svbtle is a recent blogging platform without comments, Jekyll and its brethren of blog-aware static-site generators are also without comments (unless the publisher adds them using an external service).

Nobody needs comments, and there are many good reasons not to have comments on a blog, ranging from the fact that it removes the ability for people to impulsively write a negative comment for no reason other than to be negative to reducing server and database load.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#166

Post by mgkimsal »

papsosouid wrote: post #150
mgkimsal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"easily deployable" for Clojure or Node isn't even on the radar for 99% of people. I go to any $5/month host, check "install wordpress", and it's done. When Clojure CMS/blog apps have even 1% of the installability (as in, ability to be installed) by non-developers, perhaps they'll have a fighting chance. I say this as someone who develops Grails apps all day long.

>I go to any $5/month host, check "install wordpress", and it's done. That is a function of popularity, not language. If some blogging app had a userbase the size of wordpress's, it wouldn't matter if it were written in PHP or brainfuck, shared hosting providers will set it up. This is why appealing to techies makes sense. They will be the ones setting it up in the initial "its not popular yet" phase, and if they don…

"easily deployable" is part of the equation, but even assuming a clojure app was 'easily deployable', the architecture of JVM apps runs against the interests of shared hosting providers - anyone looking to get more functionality from less hardware.

Keeping JVM engines going, and keeping a lot of compiled apps in RAM, on the offchance that someone makes a request, means fewer apps/sites can coexist on the same hardware. My $5/month PHP plan (hypothetical - I don't have one) - only compiles/executes the PHP when the request is made. If no one requests my site for 3 days, it's all just sitting there, not using any resources.

Until there's another technology that follows a similar model (or something else which provides good economies of scale for hosting providers), PHP will continue to dominate large segments of certain problem spaces.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#167

Post by onli »

dkuntz2 wrote: post #164
onli wrote: post #116

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…

What do you mean you can't make a blog without comments? Definitionally a blog is a web log, or an online journal. There is no requirement that a blog have comments. Dustin Curtis' Svbtle is a recent blogging platform without comments, Jekyll and its brethren of blog-aware static-site generators are also without comments (unless the publisher adds them using an external service). Nobody needs comments, and there are…

If I think of the platonian ideal of a blog, it has comments. And Trackback or Pingbacks. A "blog" without them is just a website someone normally updates regularily. Of course, that can have its merits, but it's not a normal blog.

And btw, I "need" comments in my blog. I like them, they add value to the articles and if an article results in a good discussion, to write him was instantly more worth it. How can you for yourself come to the conclusion that no one needs them?

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#168

Post by michaeltwofish »

wildmXranat wrote: post #143
ringmaster wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, let me say this: I love what you've done with the Ghost design. I think it's clean and useful. More on this below... 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…

I looked at the code, installed a test site and read the Wiki. Is this project on a down low at the moment with only 19 commits and low activity since late last year ? Also, when you mention that you manage to pay the bills with development of habari powered sites, do you draw from a community need for habari developers or are these clients that you persuade to use habari ? I'm curious about the overall community and…

The work happens at https://github.com/habari/system, which is very active.

I can't answer for @ringmaster, but for me it's client work, though it's a sideline to my main job at the moment.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#169

Post by slouch »

photomatt wrote: post #114
tibbon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Does that banner* need to be in place if no one has voted "It's broken" for the latest version of WP?

*This plugin hasn't been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#170

Post by tripzilch »

rhizome wrote: post #142
tripzilch wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing for introducing security vulnerabilities is not at all "reasonable", IMO. How are end-users supposed to judge whether they just blew an enormous hole in their site, by selecting a plugin from the repo?

Since there are always bugs, all code is an opportunity for security vulnerabilities. Users take their site security into their own hands whenever they have to trust others' code, as well as trusting their own coding skills (if applicable). Time to reflect upon a classic of the genre: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html There is an entire WP ecosystem of people having to judge whether they blew an enormous hol…

I didn't mean to imply this one is different.

But with web programming, if you're not good at it, but you have the perseverance to bash on code until it's "good enough that it works" (which is admirable, don't get me wrong), there's a very high chance it's got some major holes.

This is a real consideration to me, cause I'm working to teach kids technical computer skills, including programming. If I'd teach them PHP, I'd have to wall off the server, because many of their projects are bound to be full of holes, and we can't take the chance that one of those would affect our organisation's website. It's volunteer-based, so there might not be money to get a separate hosting package. Same if I were to give them all their own WP install, some of the projects are going to be forgotten, and I'm not going to be the one making sure they're all being kept up-to-date and secure for the rest of their lifetime.

And that's a cool article you linked. I already knew it, but for those who don't: it's worth reading, check it out!

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