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The dire state of WordPress

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Re: The dire state of WordPress

#111

Post by bergie »

Many of the complaints here are common to all major web CMSs, which is what drove me to write about "Decoupling Content Management" two years ago: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/decoupling_content_management/

Since then, there have been common infrastructure components like Create.js, PHPCR, and Symfony2 that have been widely accepted by many of the projects. Through that, the state of Content Management is now steadily improving.

Sadly, WordPress has so far stayed outside of this development.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#112

Post by eamann »

wonderyak wrote: post #93
mildweed wrote: post #62

Wordpress is making big steps in the right direction. * Their wild pile of oddly-named functions are being deprecated and moved into well-designed classes. * Better templating options are being promoted. * Yes, the global $wp_query leaves some to be desired, but at its core, wpdb's WP_Query is a decently powerful database abstraction, and if used right can perform well at scale. No, the hooks aren't going away, nor i…

I think curation and code review should really be an important part of the theme and plugin repositories. Perhaps they need 'approved' and 'Open' directories for the repositories? There used to be this issue with people having issues distributing plugins; now with github, that is much much easier. There is just so much bad code floating around, people not following best practices and loading JS libraries that core in…

Code review is a part of the theme repository, if you're talking about themes hosted on WordPress.org. Themes hosted elsewhere (ThemeForest, GitHub, etc) have no such oversight.

Themes hosted on WordPress.org (the official repository) have to pass through the Theme Review Team, which does enforce certain guidelines and standards: http://make.wordpress.org/themes/guidelines/

There's also a large group of people moving to add similar oversight for the official plugin repository; but when you have a repository with 24,000+ separate projects, managing a code review for each one - and for changes to each one - is a huge undertaking.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#113

Post by DanBC »

jlev wrote: post #105
jiggy2011 wrote: post #3

I'm yet to inherit a PHP project that does not contain a file called "functions.php" and it always makes my heart sink when I see it. What I don't get is the demand for all kinds of stuff to be built on top of wordpress that doesn't really have much to do with content management or blogging. For example online games, CRM systems, auction sites etc. Seems a bit like asking for a CMS system that has been implemented as…

Check out the CMS for the Pirateship, a co-working space in Somerville MA. Entirely minecraft based! http://alt.irateship.com/

If you go to the sign saying 'Put stuff in this box so you don't lose it' and then go down the map in a straight line, until you get to desert. There's a little skinny bit of desert the goes between two blobs of ocean? Just above and to the left of that there appears to be a surface spawner,

There also seems to be quite a few chunk-error style generation artifacts.

Minecraft servers with world maps that allow users to select different view styles need to be gently careful. One longform troll is to mine an enormous swastika at a specific depth. It takes so long to do this that map-resets are unpopular.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#114

Post by elithrar »

FilterJoe wrote: post #74
JVIDEL wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some cloud providers have auto-installers, its all paid though.

Can you name 1 or more cloud providers that have auto installers for Mezzanine? I'm not aware of any. Here's a post from 4 months ago comparing installing Mezzanine on a number of PaaS providers. None seemed anywhere close to as simple as installing Wordpress on Bluehost: http://appsembler.com/blog/paas-bakeoff-comparing-stackato-o... Read the comments and you'll find out that Mezzanine isn't yet compatible with Djan…

> Read the comments and you'll find out that Mezzanine isn't yet compatible with Django 1.5, causing headaches for those trying to install it for the first time.

Django 1.5 came out less than a month ago. Given the size of Mezzanine, it's not surprising that it hasn't been upgraded immediately.

I'm not sure why this would effect the install process, either: any host that can handle Django apps is likely to have both 1.4 and 1.5 available at the very least.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#115

Post by acdha »

FilterJoe wrote: post #46
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!)

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 the odds of something requiring human attention during an upgrade are high.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#116

Post by eamann »

mtgx wrote: post #109

Could it be built on top of node.js so it's all Javascript?

Considering Node can talk to MySQL - yes. Well, yes BUT.

The "but" comes in when you talk about existing themes and plugins - some are much larger applications, and all are built in PHP. So to migrate, you'd need to reimplement both WordPress itself and various themes and plugins in Node.

Not to mention that you'd need to build traction with developers to keep supporting it. Not every PHP master is also a JS master, so finding buy-in from the existing community will be hard.

Also, remember that PHP comes standard on most shared hosting environments - which is where WordPress is most often installed. Node, however, does not. So once you have developers on board, you have to get hosts on board to help set up the application.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#117

Post by eamann »

jaynate wrote: post #2

Software rewrites are extremely challenging, and more often than not, fail (good example: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html ). Perhaps a more measured factoring approach over time would be more appropriate?

WordPress is already going through a measured factoring approach.

Themes were ported over from a mishmash of procedural calls into the WP_Theme object in version 3.4. Posts (and pages, custom post types, etc) were ported over from an associative array and various procedural calls into the WP_Post object in 3.5.

But WordPress does - and likely always will - work to retain backwards compatibility so that existing themes and plugins won't choke after a core update. So even when newer APIs and refactored objects exist, its up to individual developers to 1) learn about them and 2) start using them.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#118

Post by tunesmith »

ebbv wrote: post #92
tunesmith wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who hasn't spent a ton of time extending any CMS but uses a lot of frameworks, I enjoyed EE too during the short amount of time I used it. Out of wordpress, drupal, and EE, EE is the one where writing plugins felt like normal programming since they hooked right into code igniter. (Not sure how things have changed in the last couple of years though.)

Still pretty much the same.

Main downside of EE that I remember is that when you add new functionality, the way it accomplishes this is by dynamically altering a table schema to add new columns. You can easily get up to hundreds of columns. That just seemed like it had to be a wrong approach to me, but I didn't investigate further.

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#119

Post by IheartApplesDix »

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!)

To make up completely asinine quotes with no basis on reality -- Elephants like water, except on Tuesdays.

I'm not really interested, but I love being a pretend expert on anything.

(If anyone has any comments to flesh out this thread, please feel free to bump my comment!)

Re: The dire state of WordPress

#120

Post by mortenjorck »

chrishenn wrote: post #43
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 built a site using ProcessWire[1] a while back, it was a joy to use. Really clean modern php cms. [1] http://processwire.com/

ProcessWire isn't just the best PHP CMS out there right now; I'd argue it's the best thing to happen to the CMS landscape in the last few years.

There are more powerful CMSes out there, to be sure, but the crazy thing is just how completely unprecedented PW's power is for its ease of use. It's easy like WordPress, yet it's scalable to enterprise sites with deep content taxonomies.

And it's elegant. Ironic for something built in PHP, I know, but working with its simple building blocks of templates and fields and its jQuery-like content selectors comes with a feeling of "why didn't someone do this a long time ago?"

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