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Dear WordPress

ma.tt

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Re: Dear WordPress

#11

Post by kanamekun »

saltcod wrote: post #4

> I stretched myself too thin trying to get you there, and I did a stupid thing to pay for it. I hurt you, but instead of casting me away you held me closer, supported me, gave me another chance. I will never forget that. What's all that about, I wonder?

Andy Baio posted in March 2005 about this: "Wordpress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he's been quietly hosting at least 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages." source: http://waxy.org/2005/03/wordpress_websi/

Matt acknowledged the issue with this content (cloaked with CSS) and apologized the next month: http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/

Re: Dear WordPress

#12

Post by minimaxir »

jbackus wrote: post #3

Interesting. I've seen increasing number of posts on Github Pages[1], Octopress[2], Medium[3], and Svbtle[4]. It seems that (at least in the hacker community) there is an increasing shift to minimalist blogging stacks. I'm excited to see if the rest of the world follows. [1] http://pages.github.com/ [2] http://octopress.org/ [3] https://medium.com/ [4] https://svbtle.com/

WordPress is what's being pushed for 100% control by personal bloggers and businesses. Unfortunately, there are no good alternatives, especially for those who aren't tech-savvy.

(I still recommend Tumblr over WordPress if you aren't blogging professionally, though)

Re: Dear WordPress

#13

Post by fjk »

pavs wrote: post #5
jbackus wrote: post #3

Interesting. I've seen increasing number of posts on Github Pages[1], Octopress[2], Medium[3], and Svbtle[4]. It seems that (at least in the hacker community) there is an increasing shift to minimalist blogging stacks. I'm excited to see if the rest of the world follows. [1] http://pages.github.com/ [2] http://octopress.org/ [3] https://medium.com/ [4] https://svbtle.com/

Highly unlikely. Wordpress is the opposite of simplicity, its highly configurable and thats (one of the reasons) why its so widely used. HN or hacker community is a very small community and its hardly the microcosm of the internet.

Exactly. Personally, I like playing around with static site generators but when somebody asks me how to start a website (or if I'm setting up a website for a non-technical individual) I almost always refer them to Wordpress.

I think Wordpress's greatest strengths are its ability to handle many users updating the site, personalization through a plethora of freely available themes, and its ability to handle and display many different kinds of content. All of these features are readily available without having to delve into a single line of code.

Re: Dear WordPress

#15

Post by neya »

Wordpress is growing popular, but at the cost of losing quality developers. Simply because its codebase has become horrible, memory-heavy and bloated. I understand Wordpress gives you the tools to build a CMS portal, etc. But it doesn't do one thing very well and tries to do multiple things pretty averagely. For example (this has been cited before) implementing pagination on the posts page and pages themselves is horrendous.

After being with Wordpress for more than 4 years now, I am now frustrated and recommend my clients anything but Wordpress.

It was cool and helpful, but over the years, it's codebase quality has drastically reduced. If you ran CMS'es based off wordpress, I have nothing but sorry feelings for you; simply because I ran one too.

Now, my new favorite isn't blogger or tumblr, but rather:

    rails generate scaffold Post title:string content:text

Re: Dear WordPress

#16

Post by bergie »

neya wrote: post #15

Wordpress is growing popular, but at the cost of losing quality developers. Simply because its codebase has become horrible, memory-heavy and bloated. I understand Wordpress gives you the tools to build a CMS portal, etc. But it doesn't do one thing very well and tries to do multiple things pretty averagely. For example (this has been cited before) implementing pagination on the posts page and pages themselves is hor…

I wrote some suggestions on how to fix the WordPress developer experience a while ago: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/wordpress-decoupled/

Re: Dear WordPress

#17

Post by tibbon »

Dear Wordpress- meet MVC, git, postgres, sane security and 100% testing. Please leave your old friend FTP- he was never all that safe or great to begin with.

Re: Dear WordPress

#18

Post by arkitaip »

3825 wrote: post #14

Dear Matt, Could you please use any font other than Source Sans Pro[1]? It looks terrible on at least one major desktop operating system.[2] [1] https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro [2] http://i.imgur.com/9gOuTdH.png

Looks pretty nice on my box. Maybe you need to configure your font settings?

Re: Dear WordPress

#19

Post by PetitPrince »

arkitaip wrote: post #18
3825 wrote: post #14

Dear Matt, Could you please use any font other than Source Sans Pro[1]? It looks terrible on at least one major desktop operating system.[2] [1] https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro [2] http://i.imgur.com/9gOuTdH.png

Looks pretty nice on my box. Maybe you need to configure your font settings?

That's because he use Chrome on Windows, who doesn't render webfont well due to the usage of GDI instead of DirectWrite in the Windows version: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692

Re: Dear WordPress

#20

Post by khet »

john-n wrote: post #6

I can appreciate what wordpress has achieved over the years, and what it has helped to create. But the current wordpress code base is a nightmare to work with, and doesn't scale well. Having said that, it is an excellent blogging platform and CMS, but this is something that is usually forgotten, resulting in it finding itself shoehorned into the most inappropriate places.

I get the feeling that those who "like" wordpress are either heavily invested in the platform or can't read code.

Simpler, more specialised blogging engines are so beautifully designed, I don't see myself ever wanting to work with Wordpress again.

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