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The dire state of WordPress

jshakespeare.com

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Re: The dire state of WordPress

#131

Post by homosaur »

I could not agree with this more. As I've developed larger and larger sites the more I've become frustrated with how hacky and garbage even "solid" WP code is. For crap's sake, if you use child themes you have to make functions with no return values. You have no choice.

Is a rewrite the answer? I dunno, but I sure as heck moved the WP sites to WP Engine rather than risk our servers' health on trying to deal with security and performance.

I still think it's hard to beat when dealing with a lot of content. There's at least a hundred ways to enumerate all the ways the admin sucks, but it is pretty functional compared to say, Joomla, which we migrated from. Joomla is a black box with no particular logic where I have to reach for horrific third party bullcrap to accomplish even the most basic tasks. If you have experience with Joomla, imagine managing 5000 pages with it.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#132

Post by ewitch »

bluedino wrote: post #54
booruguru wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People treat WordPress like a Swiss Army Knife because they can. Why build an online directory or CRM or auction site from scratch when you can just use WordPress? It can be a bit sloppy, code-wise, but it works and you can get the job done a lot faster than it would take to do it from scratch. Consider an online business directory. You could just build one from scratch or use some script designed for that purpose bu…

I suggested our company site be re-done using Joomla. The original site was on an ancient platform that we don't work with anymore and we kept an entire server around for it. We spun up a cloud server with Joomla on it for production use, and a local VM for testing. We had a template created for a couple hundred bucks from some ideas our designers came up with (they can't code, so...) from an Eastern-European on a fr…

Ugh I have been there with Joomla... my marketing guy thought he was creating Yahoo! for the 21st century but in reality he was breaking the site every 3 hours and then calling me for help.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#133

Post by cdevroe »

jsdalton wrote: post #7

To paraphrase Churchill, Wordpress is the worst CMS -- except for all the others. I'd love to find an open-source CMS (preferably in Python or Ruby) with clean, secure, elegant code and a well-organized framework that comes with a friendly admin and active, responsive development community like Wordpress, but so far I've got nothing. (If anyone has any suggestions, please do feel free to share them!)

I'm just catching up with this thread but the reasons that jshakes states in his blog post is some of the reason why we started hacking away on http://getbarley.com/ We'd love to open source it (API is built on CodeIgniter) when its ready.

My .2 about the current state of CMSes is that it is time for a bit of a disruption. WordPress codebase is directly tied to a lot of very big publications being able to do business daily and I don't see it being rewritten from scratch any time soon. Unless, of course, a sub-project is created. That being said, there is a lot of room for new ideas, new approaches, and new CMSes to capture at least _some_ of what WordPress currently powers. Another reason why we started hacking away at Barley... we think it is time for something brand new that is MVC from a codebase and specifically built for HTML5 / Mobile from the front-end. We hope we're right.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#134

Post by jgclarke »

acdha wrote: post #115
FilterJoe wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mezzanine is quite nice: http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ It's Python (a Django app). BSD license. It has many advantages over Wordpress that I won't get into here, but all this is offset by one massive disadvantage: It rests on the Django framework. Django is a nice framework for web development but it takes at least a few months to learn for someone starting from scratch. The installation process for Mezzanine requires s…

> Installing Wordpress on the other hand requires zero PHP knowledge. I don't disagree with your intent - it's critical to have a quickstart option for people who aren't primary developers - but there's a downside to this: a comically high percentage of exploited sites are Wordpress because it's not trivial to secure or stay updated. That's a much harder problem to solve since you really need an automatic updater but…

Your statement is patently false in two spots: One, WordPress is not a "comically high percentage" of exploited sites (presumably vs other CMS'?) - I challenge you to prove that (besides the problem of defining 'comically' for these purposes).

Two, WordPress is trivial to update, both for the core software, as well as for plugins. It's literally a two-click process to update with a constant reminder in the UI that updates are available.

I've built and manage dozens of WordPress sites at all levels, and in the few encounters I've had with compromised sites, 100% of the time it is because the end user has been willfully lazy about clicking the update button in the software.

Security is about people.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#135

Post by junto »

The beauty of WordPress is its ubiquity. I jump on my hosting account, click on the 1-click install and bingo. Click upgrade WP and boom - upgraded. Choose one of thousands of free themes and yipee-ki-yay!

The multitude of themes and plugins and the fact that I really have no need to get my hands sticky in PHP unless I really have some desperate need to fiddle with a pot of goo, is really what makes WordPress number one.

It might not be great under the covers, but the lipstick on this pig just seems to be enough to keep me happy!

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#136

Post by omgsean »

jsdalton wrote: post #7

To paraphrase Churchill, Wordpress is the worst CMS -- except for all the others. I'd love to find an open-source CMS (preferably in Python or Ruby) with clean, secure, elegant code and a well-organized framework that comes with a friendly admin and active, responsive development community like Wordpress, but so far I've got nothing. (If anyone has any suggestions, please do feel free to share them!)

Our CMS, Forge (http://factore.ca/forge-cms) is a semi-open source (in that you're free to use it for whatever you want but we don't have a community built up for it yet) Ruby on Rails CMS that focuses on rapid application development. It's VERY opinionated (moreso than Rails) but it lets you get things done really quickly and mostly stays out of your way on the front-end. Shoot me a message if you're interested in checking it out.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#137

Post by xfour »

stephen_mcd wrote: post #122
FilterJoe wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mezzanine is quite nice: http://mezzanine.jupo.org/ It's Python (a Django app). BSD license. It has many advantages over Wordpress that I won't get into here, but all this is offset by one massive disadvantage: It rests on the Django framework. Django is a nice framework for web development but it takes at least a few months to learn for someone starting from scratch. The installation process for Mezzanine requires s…

Mezzanine contains a fabric installation that can take a vanilla ubuntu install, and have a production server up and running with Postgres, memcached, et al, in a single command: http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/deployment.html#fabric I believe this is actually easier than deploying Wordpress to production.

Nice Stephen, was hoping to see you in this conversation.

I think this all comes down to really the fact that 2$ hosts have php installed by default and probably don't have shell.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#138

Post by kemoly »

jmcmichael wrote: post #66

I've used Symphony CMS (getsymphony.com) to build several websites, one of them quite large. I love it. It's the first CMS I've used that isn't a total mess architecturally. At it's core it provides a highly customizable interface for maintaining a database of content, XML data sources that pull from that database (or external XML sources), and XSL templates that are combined with the XML to produce the HTML pages of…

I wondered if Symphony was going to show up here! I'm also a fan. I've built small websites with it for over a year.

As to XSLT: I find it close enough to HTML to feel that I'm straight up writing the front-end, but with a lot more efficiency.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#139

Post by ereckers »

I do a lot of work in both Magento and WordPress and Magento has often been cited as a way of "doing it right" being built on Zend and all. If that's doing it right, I'm happy with doing it wrong.

WordPress is a great way of getting going fast. Probably a lot of guys come upon the thing just about the time a product is ready to be sunset or needs to be introduced to a team. Anything at that point is due a rewrite. I would imagine this experience alone is the cause of much consternation and whatever the product/website would have been built on would be the whipping boy.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#140

Post by dave1010uk »

As others have mentioned, forking WordPress won't help. Writing abstraction layers might help a little (I've done that myself a few times) but instead, if you use WordPress, I'd encourage you to get involved with improving it directly. It's a slow process (especially as WordPress still supports PHP 5.2) but there is progress.

If you know PHP then there's loads of issues you could get involved with to help move it forward. Here's just 4 that could do with some attention:

* PSR-0 autoloader http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21300

* Use a Symfony style request object instead of globals http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/22325

* Use PDO for database access http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21663

* PSR compatibility http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/23357

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