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Ghost — rethinking WordPress

john.onolan.org

181–190 of 236 posts

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#182

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…

Hey - I'm making a thing called https://jekyllhub.com - it's designed to take the pain our of Jekyll and get you blogging quickly and easily. I'd love to get your feedback on it. If you send me your email, I can make you a free lifetime account: andrew@atevans.com

Cheers!

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#183

build this on top of jekyll or its a fail.

Developer of https://jekyllhub.com here. I think Jekyll might be over-complicated for what Ghost is going for. WordPress and the hypothetical Ghost seem to target the mass-market; Jekyll is mostly about power features. Easy integration with git via the filesystem, code highlighting with pygments, configuration with yaml... most people really wouldn't care about that kind of stuff.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#184
post #16
post #9

"wordpress is awesome"... NOT

A well written argument with plenty of valid points. I'm just going to stop using Wordpress now.

i don't think it's the right place to go into detail here, but there are so many things which make wordpress NOT awesome, that i cannot take anyone seriously who states that wordpress IS awesome. architecture, performance, wordpress's code itself, templating, continious security issues just to name a few.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#185

As someone who makes WordPress sites almost 8 hours a day, what would be the best start is a rewrite of the WordPress core on a popular, modern framework (my vote would be Symfony2). This would bring a breath of fresh air to coding for WordPress. Ideally much of the API would be similar too.

One of the things we're looking at moving forward is using things like this. We're taking a look at various frameworks at the moment as we look to move forward on a few issues (such as request variable abstraction, for which we're looking at Symfony's HttpFoundation/HttpKernel).

However, WordPress still supports PHP 5.2, whereas most frameworks are now 5.3+. There's still a huge [1] userbase still on 5.2, so dropping it isn't really possible at this point in time.

[1]: http://wordpress.org/about/stats/

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#186
post #68

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…

> Is it safe to say that without a vastly improved mobile experience WordPress is in serious trouble?

Absolutely. We had the WordPress community summit just last week, and one of the topics we discussed several times was mobile. The WordPress apps are good, but there's improvements that can be made to both the apps and the way they interact with a WordPress install, so plans were made to move this stuff forward. It's definitely something that everyone (especially Matt) is interested in.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#187
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…

I used to think that "mobile responsiveness" was the "Holy Grail" of smart website design. Now, I've come to the conclusion that most modern mobile devices are completely capable of displaying the full version of most websites. Every time I use my iPhone to browse to Twitter or LinkedIn I'm taken away from the full site and to a silly "mobile" site that resembles the native app. If I wanted the native app. experience…

I really like the Dolphin browser on Android, partly because it lets you switch between mobile and "desktop" modes (lies in the agent string). I don't find I have to use desktop mode that often, but its really handy when its there.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#188
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.

Yes thats the way to create great new products. Make it easy for non-techies to get them up and running and make sure they run on shared hosting and are created in a language that beginners use to learn about programming.

[deleted]

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes thats the way to create great new products. Make it easy for non-techies to get them up and running and make sure they run on shared hosting and are created in a language that beginners use to learn about programming.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, so I'll just assume the worst. Yes, it is - there's a lot more non-techies than there are of the other kind, so it makes sense that you focus your efforts on the larger market. As for the whole "language that beginners use to learn about programming", do you mean Python or Java? PHP is everywhere but the last I checked, Python and Java are the teaching and taught languag…

Back in the 1900's and even before that electric cars were invented by several people. In 1916 some inventor called 'Woods' created the frist hybrid car. One reason for the decline of the electric car market was that the infrastructure eventually could not facilitate them. Read; hosting providers didn't support them. Another reason was they were slightly more expensive, especially when Herny Ford came along. Read; shared hosting is cheap. Another reason I have heard told is that electric cars had less parts that you could tinker with. It was more interesting to have a fuel car because you could use other car's parts and combine them, you could spend your weekend working on them. Electric cars just worked, or people didn't have the technical know-how to toy around with them. Read; non-techies don't know how to setup a Rails app. Assuming 'Ghost' is the new best thing, making the underlying technologie easy for non-techies is NOT the way to make it happen. The whole goal seems to be to make the UI easy and useful. You make the point that non-techies need to be able to set it up. You make the wrong assumption that they would need to touch code/servers to do this.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#190
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A long-term temporary setback. Even if a) it magically works and does everything, and b) most people get them, you're still looking a span of years before you can count on Glasses users being a significant fraction of your audience.
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