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WP21

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Re: WP21

#131

Post by JeanMarcS »

egman_ekki wrote: post #126
JeanMarcS wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WordPress is a great blogging CMS. The fact that people use it for something else is what create strong opinions. Example : woo commerce. Products ? In the WP_POST db. Orders ? In the WP_POST db. And in every post about WP it says that using WP_POST for storing your data is good practice. Well I don't think it is (but it's only my opinion. A strong one). And the problem is that a LOT of plugins and themes are like th…

> Example : woo commerce. > Orders ? In the WP_POST db. No longer true, at least for new installations: https://woocommerce.com/document/high-performance-order-stor...

Ok, sorry for this example. I last worked on one about a year and a half ago.

Re: WP21

#132

Post by sbarre »

tomthe wrote: post #102
noduerme wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kill the freelancer? I'm a freelancer and my favorite thing to tell cheap potential clients for the past 15 years is do their site with Wordpress and to go find a Wordpress "expert". It exists for the broke and the cheap who are under the illusion that they need a simple website, which itself is a dead letter.

Why do you think they might be wrong when they want a simple website?

Because most non-technical people greatly underestimate all the moving parts in a website, even a simple one.

And yes some websites truly are simple and can be managed with a few Markdown pages and a static site generator (even that can be a barrier to non-technical folk), but any kind of advertising or small business website - even if it's a single page - needs the ability to be updated or managed by a non-technical person and those parts are unknown/invisible at first.

Wordpress, for all it's problems, is one possible solution that can help those people have the website they imagine or want without the sticker shock that comes with the eventual realization that their website (as a whole) is not "simple".

Re: WP21

#133

Post by 9dev »

onli wrote: post #118
9dev wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code is never just working. The environment it runs in changes, requiring refactoring things. We’re not talking about a showcase piece of artisan algorithm here, but bug-riddled legacy code reliant on outdated system packages, SQL queries that cannot use bound parameters for historic reasons and are ever-prone to injection attacks. Code that uses broken multibyte encoding, such that it is vulnerable to several attack…

> Are you seriously telling me software performance should not improved if the core functionality kinda, sorta, works? I would not hesitate to take this position. Of course it depends, on how severe the bugs are, especially for the outer code (like plugins) calling it, and on how bad the performance is. But otherwise absolutely, never break user space. > The environment it runs in changes The web environment Wordpres…

> But otherwise absolutely, never break user space.

Neither the Linux kernel, nor OpenSSL, or any other reasonably complex project manages to do that over a given time frame. Sometimes you need to adapt, and things break in the process. Nobody would expect a house built 30 years ago to not require some maintenance and upgrades over time.

> The web environment Wordpress runs in did not change all that much. The JS ecosystem simulates big changes, but that's all bullshit. Server code that worked 30 years ago still works - if projects like PHP don't go out of their way to break it.

That sure sounds good, but is simply not true. We went from HTTP and FTP deployments to TLS and containers, from dialup to gigabit consumer uplink; the browser isn't a remote document viewer but a platform-agnostic virtual machine for fully-fledged applications; the web is centred around a few enormous platforms; people regularly stream GBs worth of video and expect services to deliver web apps on a variety of devices; they don't post on bulletin boards and in news groups, but use chat services; scammers distribute ransomware, steal your identity, remotely take compromising pictures from your webcam, or order stuff from your shopping accounts online. The modern web has almost nothing in common with the one from 30 years ago.

Re: WP21

#134

Post by oblio »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #30

WP is 21 years old, and people on HN still bishing and crying about it. How come no one has offered something that can beat WP in 21 years?

> WP is 21 years old, and people on HN still bishing and crying about it. How come no one has offered something that can beat WP in 21 years?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_moat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect

Something can be mind-numbingly bad, yet be almost impossible to dislodge.

Re: WP21

#135

Post by oblio »

onli wrote: post #118
9dev wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code is never just working. The environment it runs in changes, requiring refactoring things. We’re not talking about a showcase piece of artisan algorithm here, but bug-riddled legacy code reliant on outdated system packages, SQL queries that cannot use bound parameters for historic reasons and are ever-prone to injection attacks. Code that uses broken multibyte encoding, such that it is vulnerable to several attack…

> Are you seriously telling me software performance should not improved if the core functionality kinda, sorta, works? I would not hesitate to take this position. Of course it depends, on how severe the bugs are, especially for the outer code (like plugins) calling it, and on how bad the performance is. But otherwise absolutely, never break user space. > The environment it runs in changes The web environment Wordpres…

> Server code that worked 30 years ago still works - if projects like PHP don't go out of their way to break it.

I'd be horrified to expose ANY software written 30 years ago to the internet, if it touches money or valuable data in any way.

Re: WP21

#136

Post by onli »

9dev wrote: post #133
onli wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you seriously telling me software performance should not improved if the core functionality kinda, sorta, works? I would not hesitate to take this position. Of course it depends, on how severe the bugs are, especially for the outer code (like plugins) calling it, and on how bad the performance is. But otherwise absolutely, never break user space. > The environment it runs in changes The web environment Wordpres…

> But otherwise absolutely, never break user space. Neither the Linux kernel, nor OpenSSL, or any other reasonably complex project manages to do that over a given time frame. Sometimes you need to adapt, and things break in the process. Nobody would expect a house built 30 years ago to not require some maintenance and upgrades over time. > The web environment Wordpress runs in did not change all that much. The JS eco…

> That sure sounds good, but is simply not true.

Sure it's true. Many users are still doing deployment FTP-style, even if it's not the original protocol anymore. That the pipes are bigger just meant we could up the thumbnail size, and the browser is still also a remote document viewer for sites that don't demand more. I just today answered a support question on a bulletin board, and so on.

There are other aspects of the web today, but the old way still exists.

> Nobody would expect a house built 30 years ago to not require some maintenance and upgrades over time.

You can do upgrades of software in a way that does not break compatibility, and you can definitely always aim to minimize breakage. Wordpress is not a bad example for just that. HN itself counts as a further example. If it weren't possible we wouldn't have this thread to discuss in.

Re: WP21

#137

Post by debesyla »

Raed667 wrote: post #111

I will always fondly remember that time i was in college (~2011), and created a fully working social network for my classmates using WordPress and ungodly amount of Plugins, and ducktape code I barely understood. A user profile display was ~30 SQL queries (who needs cache), and my poor 5$ VPS was sweating ... learned a lot on what not to do! fun times !

30 SQL queries are basically normally functioning WordPress, it's a bit more unusual when it gets to 150+ queries zone :)

Re: WP21

#138

Post by donatj »

askonomm wrote: post #66

I just wish WordPress actually adhered to development standards, not actively tried to break them. Using globals everywhere and encouraging spaghetti code with its classic themes, and with its new themes it evidently learned nothing and is encouraging JSON inside HTML comments which obviously has no editor support, is very prone to errors, besides being just plain stupid (like seriously, some senior engineers I assum…

I am by no means a Wordpress expert, but I have had to deal with moving clients sites from time to time and I have vivid memories of hardcoded absolute file system paths in the database embedded in serialized PHP that broke when trying to move their installation to a new server with mildly different pathing.

Re: WP21

#139

Post by Tijdreiziger »

sbarre wrote: post #132
tomthe wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think they might be wrong when they want a simple website?

Because most non-technical people greatly underestimate all the moving parts in a website, even a simple one. And yes some websites truly are simple and can be managed with a few Markdown pages and a static site generator (even that can be a barrier to non-technical folk), but any kind of advertising or small business website - even if it's a single page - needs the ability to be updated or managed by a non-technical…

WordPress is simple for the user.

It’s like a lightbulb. Of course, the manufacturing of lightbulbs is a highly technical topic. However, to the user, they present a simple interface (screw it in and flip the switch).

I feel like this is a point that devs often miss. Simplicity from the POV of a user and the POV of a dev are completely different things.

The dev finds a static site generator simple, and WordPress unnecessarily complex. The user finds WordPress simple, and an SSG unusable.

Re: WP21

#140

Post by Tijdreiziger »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #77
askonomm wrote: post #66

I just wish WordPress actually adhered to development standards, not actively tried to break them. Using globals everywhere and encouraging spaghetti code with its classic themes, and with its new themes it evidently learned nothing and is encouraging JSON inside HTML comments which obviously has no editor support, is very prone to errors, besides being just plain stupid (like seriously, some senior engineers I assum…

They encourage lots and lots of bad practices. I mean, just look at themes and how they are built by default. Comments in a CSS file describe the theme metadata. Using concattenation instead of composition everywhere, so that parts of HTML are not reusable. CSS, inside JS inside HTML inside PHP ... Part of it is this implicit structure it defines, which file it loads adter ehich other file to make a whole page. It se…

Their mantra of ‘never break backwards compatibility’ is a double-edged sword.

It makes them extremely friendly to non-technical users, which I think is the majority of their userbase.

However, it makes it impossible for them to change technical decisions made in the past.

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