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WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

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Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#11

Post by iambateman »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #5
firecall wrote: post #4

> Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.” In my experience, WordPress itself could be called a Cancer to the Web. The amount of new clients I've picked up who needed help rescuing broken and malware ridden WordPress sites is... well, it's more than I'd like as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL

And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need, and all they can afford, and all they can figure out without hiring IT. Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins. If anyone wants to join me rewriting it in Laravel so we could add a WSL-like layer f…

Statamic for Laravel is pretty great for what it does.

I wrote a WYSIWYG CMS for Laravel called Prodigy that I really enjoy but it hasn’t gotten much market pick up.

There’s definitely some thinking in this area on how to move WP users toward Laravel.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#12

Post by econcon »

firecall wrote: post #4

> Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.” In my experience, WordPress itself could be called a Cancer to the Web. The amount of new clients I've picked up who needed help rescuing broken and malware ridden WordPress sites is... well, it's more than I'd like as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL

We had that problem in barebones WP with no plugins at all.

Once we installed a few security plugins, it worked out just fine!

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#13

Post by Aloha »

Disclaimer WP Engine Customer -

I read the comments from Matt M yesterday, and it felt like a hit piece.

I run a website for a couple scifi like conventions, we need cheap reliable hosting without me having to deal with the vagaries of running wordpress myself.

I would have bought a product like WP Engine directly from Automattic, but AFAIK they dont offer one, this feels like lashing out at a competitor because they failed to enter a market segment, and now feel their lunch is being ate.

I ran websites for a long time without any version control, and would have no problem doing it again, the benefit of WordPress is the semi-WYSIWYG editor and the plugin ecosystem.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#14

Post by gjsman-1000 »

iambateman wrote: post #11
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need, and all they can afford, and all they can figure out without hiring IT. Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins. If anyone wants to join me rewriting it in Laravel so we could add a WSL-like layer f…

Statamic for Laravel is pretty great for what it does. I wrote a WYSIWYG CMS for Laravel called Prodigy that I really enjoy but it hasn’t gotten much market pick up. There’s definitely some thinking in this area on how to move WP users toward Laravel.

Statamic is awesome; watching Jack McDade in person at Laracon last month was great.

However, Statamic is not a WordPress replacement. We need a system that can be installed, with hundreds of themes and plugins available, without touching code. An open-source Squarespace, basically.

Statamic has a role, but not as a WordPress replacement for most people unfortunately…

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#15

Post by bsder »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #5
firecall wrote: post #4

> Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.” In my experience, WordPress itself could be called a Cancer to the Web. The amount of new clients I've picked up who needed help rescuing broken and malware ridden WordPress sites is... well, it's more than I'd like as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL

And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need, and all they can afford, and all they can figure out without hiring IT. Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins. If anyone wants to join me rewriting it in Laravel so we could add a WSL-like layer f…

> And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need

Except they don't. A static website would work for 99.9% of all businesses and could be hosted on a potato.

The problem is that marketing wants a website that "Doesn't look embarassing and has 5 nines uptime."

Translation: "Marketing wants a website that looks completely like our competitors(because reasons)! But make it completely different (because reasons)! And make sure it's on AWS (because reasons)!"

Response from IT: "Our website results in zero revenue to the company and is a gigantic security problem and spam magnet. And because marketing is involved it's also a headache of a political football. Here's the WP Engine credentials. Now fuck off."

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#16

Post by gjsman-1000 »

bsder wrote: post #15
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need, and all they can afford, and all they can figure out without hiring IT. Which means, if we want to kill WordPress, we need to offer a better solution. Not just for WordPress, but a coherent system that also reimplements the top hundred or so plugins. If anyone wants to join me rewriting it in Laravel so we could add a WSL-like layer f…

> And yet, reality is that for many companies, an off-the-shelf CMS is all they need Except they don't. A static website would work for 99.9% of all businesses and could be hosted on a potato. The problem is that marketing wants a website that "Doesn't look embarassing and has 5 nines uptime." Translation: "Marketing wants a website that looks completely like our competitors(because reasons)! But make it completely d…

> Response from IT

This is where the mistake was made. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of small businesses do not have an IT department.

Even the business I work in - almost a dozen employees before a single IT guy.

WordPress and Squarespace, and software like them, are the off-the-shelf solutions for them. You sign up for GoDaddy or another shared hosting provider, what do you get? Right now though, Squarespace is eating WordPress’ lunch, and (if you don’t need plugins) is objectively superior in many ways.

We need a modern replacement for WordPress to fulfill that role which won’t make programmers swear, or let closed-source solutions shut out the open ones.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#17

Post by _hmry »

CPLX wrote: post #7

Without additional context the letter does read as persuasive. Is there significant additional context? Having looked at Matt's comments in the speech I'm not seeing any actual substance of what's wrong with WP Engine.

There's possible context (unknown veracity) from this comment 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41614406

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#18

Post by dylan604 »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #8
firecall wrote: post #4

> Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.” In my experience, WordPress itself could be called a Cancer to the Web. The amount of new clients I've picked up who needed help rescuing broken and malware ridden WordPress sites is... well, it's more than I'd like as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL

I wonder to what extent that can be attributed to its ubiquity versus its quality. I've never worked with WordPress. For example, I notice that most of the automated "attacks" on my server are WordPress related. Is its defect rate significantly higher than other systems', or is it just that if you're going fishing you should bait for the most common fish? PHP and Apache come up a lot too.

It's like any other system designed to be used by people that are not technically savvy. Lots of things have default values that are not sane. That's why the script kiddies hit every server they can with known defaults and vulns. Otherwise, it's like any other publicly facing internet server in that it takes maintenance with patches and updates and being informed on what you're running and changes being made.

So because the majority of users are not savvy, it's become a cesspool. Then you read about it on a tech forum like HN and it is derided as an inferior product rather than allowing improper use by the user/operator.

Re: WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic

#19

Post by chris_wot »

firecall wrote: post #4

> Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg unleashed a scathing attack on a rival firm this week, calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.” In my experience, WordPress itself could be called a Cancer to the Web. The amount of new clients I've picked up who needed help rescuing broken and malware ridden WordPress sites is... well, it's more than I'd like as I really do not enjoy WordPress LOL

I personally don't like block themes.
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