Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ghost — rethinking WordPress

john.onolan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 236 posts

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#201

Post by jtallant »

benackles wrote: post #197
johnonolan wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 phi…

Hey John, First of all, gorgeous mockups! I love where you're headed with the design and user experience. The cluttered WordPress dashboard and clunky post editor are my least favorite aspects of WordPress. I also really like how you're incorporating Markdown syntax. There are a few points where I disagree. Forking WordPress would mean keeping loads of legacy code. It would also mean you'd be binding a future platfor…

I agree with the points you've made here but one of the reasons WordPress got so popular is because PHP is just on the server. But if you're looking for a Ruby/Rails CMS check out http://refinerycms.com/. Their UI could use some work too but the developer has a lot of power with it being a Rails app. I wish more people would get behind it.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#202

Post by jtallant »

wmeredith wrote: post #82
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?

I don't know much of anything about Rails. As for the per-post CSS files it would be easy to do with a Posts custom field. You could take text input (CSS) and spit it out in the header using a basic query on the current post.

Splitting everything up like that also makes it a lot of fun when you want to redesign your site ;-)

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#203

Post by armanmirk »

johnonolan wrote: post #85
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…

Thanks Matt - I don't necessarily doubt that WordPress users are blogging, it's just that WordPress(.org) isn't focused on those users any more. That's fine, as mentioned in the post, but there is a reason that Svbtle (etc) is suddenly the flavour of the month, and it's not just cause Dustin is the coolest kid in San Fran.

There is no problem with what Ghost is setting out to do. For some of us WordPress is not reacting quickly enough to adopting the 21 century way of providing user experience. Obviously it's unrealistic for WordPress itself to drop everything and focus on this (that just isn't how life works), but it's certainly interesting and worthwhile to explore how modernisation of WordPress will enhance its original reason to exist. Looking at Ghost from this perspective and all the other reasons that John mentions in a comment below makes forking WordPress the right thing to do

This project doesn't need someone who loves WordPress and wants make more plugins for it. It needs someone who thinks they can make a good thing even better. Steve Jobs didn't just make a new cover for mobile phones. He fundamentally proved that communicational devices must become many times better than what they were before and that's what I expect from John.

Even Steve couldn't fix AT&T so don't expect John to fix WordPress core issues. That job is for WordPress itself.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#204

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#205

Post by jaytaylor »

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…

+1 for Habari, especially for keeping it relatively sane compared to WP.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#206

Post by aj »

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…

The images and the proposal part was what I noted first as well. I left the site as soon as I noticed that all content was in images. I wonder what the reasoning behind such a poor choice of displaying content was? Prevent Search Engine crawling? Prevent easy copying of the text?

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#207

Post by mmishra »

mars wrote: post #184
mokash wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there any alternative ? I guess there platform is very generic that is why there are 1000s of themes. I was able to build up http://syncfin.com in less than a month using wordpress and with an awesome theme. I believe it is a great platform but would like to know if there is any alternative ? I am not looking for RoR or DJango for just a simple blogging needs until there is some significant performance improvement prrof.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#208

Post by maguay »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #176
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 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 f…

I'm another one who writes for a living and writes 100% in Markdown, then convert to HTML for Markdown. I just moved my own site to Kirby so I could publish with straight Markdown files. I know we're far from the only ones that do that.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#209

Post by lachlanj »

JimWestergren wrote: post #40

What is needed is a rewrite and not a fork. But why Open Source? Such a proper rewrite is a big undertaking and I don't see how that could be pulled off without financial compensation. Why not offer it for let's say $19 per domain? I would easily pay for it and I am sure many others. This way you could at least pay salaries to developers working on it.

Jim, this idea (private and pay per domain) is already done extremely well by squarespace.com

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#210

Post by EnderMB »

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/

Many other CMS's are easy to develop for. The "scalability" issue is true but as I'm aware none of the top ten sites use WordPress.

The point I disagree with the most is that users won't need training to use it. I hear this all the time with absolutely nothing to back it up, other than "I haven't trained a user to use it".

Well, I have, and the users for this company struggled a lot with how things will work. I've trained users on numerous scripts, including Umbraco, Sitecore, Concrete5 and bespoke CMS's and every one of the others were far easier to both sell to a client and train. Umbraco and Concrete5 are far better for users than WordPress.

Post reply on HN