Ghost — rethinking WordPress • Hacker News Board

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#171

Post by 2arrs2ells » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 9:28 PM UTC

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…

Code is maintained in https://github.com/habari/system

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#172

Post by BUGHUNTER » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 9:29 PM UTC

The most important thing would be a really good extension system - the wordpress plugin system is so massively broken and there are so many bad plugins - this crap must be sorted out - but it is a good place to study how to produce bad code.

Extensibility is the key factor for any modern web framework / language / system.

Also Wordpress is last-century with deployment options - there are no (built in) options for deployment and a smooth upgrade process including backups and optional rollbacks. The "automatic updates" claim by WP is btw. a good example for the limiting view of marketing jargon and how technical terms can be abused and this way educating millions of flies to eat tthe wrong food. Upgrade without rollback of course does not make sense and is no way "automatic".

Please, if you build a new system, study modern web frameworks before and please do NOT use PHP.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#173

Post by kmfrk » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 9:32 PM UTC

danneu wrote: post #160

dangrossman wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 commu…

There might be a hump to get over at first, but I think Markdown is going to be by far the best to go for in the long run.

What did your cheatsheet look like?

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#174

Post by FuzzyDunlop » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 9:34 PM UTC

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…

Sure, can't refute that. However it's the same mentality that allows the same, basic vulnerabilities to persist throughout the years. The code basically works so sod it, who cares.

Of course, I fall short of offering a solution, because there is none that doesn't imply writing bug-free code (impossible if it's not trivial); spending inordinate amounts of our spare time vetting this code; or otherwise stopping people from learning in the first place. The other one is to tell people not to use these plugins, or to be more careful, but they need to know what's currently'safe' and what isn't.

I just don't like the mindset that 'shipping' code is the be-all and end-all when as masters of our craft (hyperbolic?) we should at least aspire to more than 'good enough' or 'working', even if it's unattainable.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#175

Post by ckluis » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 9:34 PM UTC

nacin wrote: post #105

JamesSL wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its WordPress' support for older versions and depreciated plugins which is of the bigger issues.

Our commitment to backwards compatibility simply forces us to make smarter, more deliberate decisions. Because we talk so much about our back compat efforts, it is certainly understandable that people might think that is where almost all of our development effort goes. But that isn't actually the case. We heavily emphasize our philosophies because it makes adopting and updating WordPress easier, and we want users to…

Any thoughts on frameworks like roots which modify the normal core theme structure?

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#176

Post by filmgirlcw » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 9:46 PM UTC

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 disagree. I know I'm on the fringe but I make my living as a writer and 100% of my work is written in Markdown (MultiMarkdown, actually) that I then convert to HTML to paste into WordPress. Is it perfect for everyone, no, but for the subset of users who want to roll their own server setup and still have an easy-to-use publishing platform, it sure does fill a lot of boxes.

Moreover, I can teach people Markdown 10x faster than I can teach them CMS-specific HTML rules. Moreover, WordPress's TinyMCE stuff can break quiet easily (we have to disable it for most of our writers, I'm still allowed to have it because I never use it), so having a readably syntax AND having an instant-preview seems pretty perfect.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#177

Post by __david__ » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 9:58 PM UTC

forgotAgain wrote: post #162

I have this great idea for a really cool new product. It shouldn't take a good coder more than a couple of days. Contact me if your interested.

What a pointlessly snarky comment. I didn't see anything in the post that implied that the task was easy or that he was underestimating the work. He seemed to know the product, and to have even been involved with it directly at some point in time.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#178

Post by photomatt » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 10:18 PM UTC

papsosouid wrote: post #161

photomatt wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

That's sort of like saying Facebook scaling is a "non-issue" because it's just a bunch of small, independent profile pages. Of course some elements can and should be sharded, but that doesn't mean that scaling is trivial, especially as you get into more advanced and social features and a rapidly increasing percentage of traffic is logged in and fully dynamic.

I think we agree that "scaling" small (sub-RAM-size) amounts of data to a largely logged-out and cached audience is easy, but I think you think of WordPress.com as much smaller and more static than it actually is. My apologies if I'm misunderstanding your point of view.

If you want to see standalone sites in the top 100 running WP besides wordpress.com, check out time.com, umbrellanews.com, celebuzz.com, and large sections of nytimes.com, cnn.com, and people.com. If you were to spider the top million Alexa domains, you'd find about 17% of them on WP:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_man...

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#179

Post by pazimzadeh » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 10:42 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…

http://markdownr.com

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#180

Post by tehayj » Mon, Nov 05, 2012, 10:54 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…

I'm looking forward that Wordpress becomes more like self hosted Facebook profiles (just better of course). I'm absolutely looking forward what you guys plan for the mobile part.

I remember switching from my first self written CMS to a small blogging platform called wordpress a couple of years ago. I never looked back after that :)