Automattic is definitely a company I wouldn't mind being acquired by. They seem to genuinely put "make cool stuff" before "ecosystem! lock in! billionaires!". Congrats!
WooThemes joins Automattic
131–140 of 159 posts
Re: WooThemes joins Automattic
#132I'm a fan of Wordpress but not the templates which are available. They never take performance into consideration. Most wordpress sites are slow primarily Becuase of the frontend performance. 5 css and 10 JavaScript files seems to be the average. As for woothemes it's 2015 and the page where they have announced this acquisition still isn't responsive and they want to take over 51% of the web. Hope they switch gears an…
Yes, same complaint from me, but I think their problem is the target audience, which probably opts for flashy sliders and kitch-sink approaches to design instead of keeping it simple and fast.
However, coincidentally WooThemes offers a theme that advertises itself with something along the lines of "no sliders, no fonts, no bloat" - forgot the name, but it's a good move.
Re: WooThemes joins Automattic
#133I'm fascinated by Wordpress success. It's an horrible peace of software, with horrible PHP code 4.x style, a db schema only a beginner could have come up with and an ecosystem with a lot of trash(not even talking about the admin which is hideous ). Yet it's a blazing success in the CMS space, because of 3 things that are insanely overlooked by other CMS developers : - Ease of installation - It runs on a minimal PHP/A…
> It's an horrible peace of software, with horrible PHP code 4.x style, a db schema only a beginner could have come up with and an ecosystem with a lot of trash [...] I must disagree with these statements. Although it is not the most elegant one I've seen, using the word "horrible" is simply out of place. Have you ever built some sites with it? Do you realize that WordPress is developed in open source with many talen…
> Apart from that, you can write your own beautiful code according to the newest PHP standards if you want in your WordPress-powered projects.
You really can't. Wordpress actively prevents you from writing beautiful, modern code. When writing themes, every template has to be in the root directory of the theme, creating an awful mess. All of wordpress has global variables and/or state in functions that is simply inescapable, making it impossible to write unit tests. Dependency injection is completely out of the question.
If you want to modify some behaviour and someone hasn't thought of putting in a filter for the exact thing you want to modify, it's not a matter of extending a class and overriding a method. Because wordpress is littered with huge god functions with global state, you basically have to copy/paste hundreds of lines of code and make sure that you keep that up-to-date with core updates yourself to prevent future bugs.
Several times I've gone into plugin development thinking "this must be possible without making too much of a mess", thinking I can separate out the unit-testable bits and write a thin WP wrapping layer that deals with the global state. Every time I've been disappointed.
It's not about PHP versions alone. It's that Wordpress was designed in and for PHP 4, and was never modernized. That's an inescapable fact, regardless of which PHP version your server runs.
Re: WooThemes joins Automattic
#134I'm fascinated by Wordpress success. It's an horrible peace of software, with horrible PHP code 4.x style, a db schema only a beginner could have come up with and an ecosystem with a lot of trash(not even talking about the admin which is hideous ). Yet it's a blazing success in the CMS space, because of 3 things that are insanely overlooked by other CMS developers : - Ease of installation - It runs on a minimal PHP/A…
First, I should mention that I'm glad to see this dismissive and negative comment voted to the top. I was starting to worry that HN was losing its edge. Next, you mention: > Yet it's a blazing success in the CMS space, because of 3 things that are insanely overlooked by other CMS developers : - Ease of installation - It runs on a minimal PHP/Apache/Mysql setup (cheap hosting) - It has a great backward compatibly, unl…
Wagtail is looking really, really good. It runs on Django, which is a turn-off for some, but in terms of a friendly, dynamic CMS for editors, it’s shaping up really well.
Re: WooThemes joins Automattic
#135I'm fascinated by Wordpress success. It's an horrible peace of software, with horrible PHP code 4.x style, a db schema only a beginner could have come up with and an ecosystem with a lot of trash(not even talking about the admin which is hideous ). Yet it's a blazing success in the CMS space, because of 3 things that are insanely overlooked by other CMS developers : - Ease of installation - It runs on a minimal PHP/A…
First, I should mention that I'm glad to see this dismissive and negative comment voted to the top. I was starting to worry that HN was losing its edge. Next, you mention: > Yet it's a blazing success in the CMS space, because of 3 things that are insanely overlooked by other CMS developers : - Ease of installation - It runs on a minimal PHP/Apache/Mysql setup (cheap hosting) - It has a great backward compatibly, unl…
OctoberCMS is a pleasure to use.
Re: WooThemes joins Automattic
#136I'm fascinated by Wordpress success. It's an horrible peace of software, with horrible PHP code 4.x style, a db schema only a beginner could have come up with and an ecosystem with a lot of trash(not even talking about the admin which is hideous ). Yet it's a blazing success in the CMS space, because of 3 things that are insanely overlooked by other CMS developers : - Ease of installation - It runs on a minimal PHP/A…
> It's an horrible peace of software, with horrible PHP code 4.x style, a db schema only a beginner could have come up with and an ecosystem with a lot of trash(not even talking about the admin which is hideous ). Yet it's a blazing success in the CMS space, because of 3 things that are insanely overlooked by other CMS developers You've answered your own question :-D When you say WordPress is horrible, what you mean…
Perfectly said, nobody cares what is under the hood 99% of the time, its about if it works for their needs and "just works". And, WP kicks ass as flexibility in creating and maintaining an advanced and powerful website.
Re: WooThemes joins Automattic
#137I'm fascinated by Wordpress success. It's an horrible peace of software, with horrible PHP code 4.x style, a db schema only a beginner could have come up with and an ecosystem with a lot of trash(not even talking about the admin which is hideous ). Yet it's a blazing success in the CMS space, because of 3 things that are insanely overlooked by other CMS developers : - Ease of installation - It runs on a minimal PHP/A…
> It's true however that while Wordpress gets a lot of heat from PHP devs, there is no effort from the PHP community to build something like Wordpress with a better codebase, and a better db schema. That's not true. Several ex-WordPress developers started the Habari Project to build a modern and clean PHP CMS: http://habariproject.org/en/
WP has a huge and massive ecosystem, it is it's own economy. Someone might write something better from a code perspective, but it is going nowhere unless it can gain the critical mass WP did.
Re: WooThemes joins Automattic
#138I'm fascinated by Wordpress success. It's an horrible peace of software, with horrible PHP code 4.x style, a db schema only a beginner could have come up with and an ecosystem with a lot of trash(not even talking about the admin which is hideous ). Yet it's a blazing success in the CMS space, because of 3 things that are insanely overlooked by other CMS developers : - Ease of installation - It runs on a minimal PHP/A…
I believe that, even though some of the code is so old, Automattic is doing a great job moving the game forward.
Take the Jetpack plugin for example. It is a super-great plugin with many features that are good and low on memory in the system.
If you take a look at the Jetpack code you'll see some improvements over there.
It will take time to rewrite the whole wordpress code without breaking chances, but for now I can't praise the WP community enough, and Automattic too, for such easy to use product.
The whole wp.com integration (with automatic upgrades and so on) also makes everything much better.
BTW you can also customize wordpress with no code, but you'll have to use a theme for that (Thesis is a great example, if you want to try it).
Also, yes, Drupal might be better from a code perspect, but I always got the feeling that the whole experience was not as good as wordpress.
HN is a developer-community, so I understand here it's just ok to think about how good the code is, but I don't think we should ignore the whole experience, because in the end that's what pays off. Wordpress created a seamless experience from installation to use. Yes, it might be a bit old-style, but it works so beautifully you just enjoy it. Whenever I got a look at Drupal/Joomla administrations I always feel a bit lost, maybe it's just me, but I believe that is the key difference (together with simplicity and plugins) of the wordpress adoption.
Re: WooThemes joins Automattic
#139This is a really smart acquisition. WordPress continues to dominate the CMS market. With the upcoming REST API, it's only going to get better. I'm watching niche CMS industry after niche CMS industry crumble under the continual migration to WordPress. The latest victims are the small CMS vendors who have been selling proprietary CMS solutions to public school districts for the past 15 years, charging far too much mon…
Is this the REST API you are talking about: wp-api.org
I'm not the OP you're responding to, but that's the link I often see referenced in regards to the REST API.
Re: WooThemes joins Automattic
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, I should mention that I'm glad to see this dismissive and negative comment voted to the top. I was starting to worry that HN was losing its edge. Next, you mention: > Yet it's a blazing success in the CMS space, because of 3 things that are insanely overlooked by other CMS developers : - Ease of installation - It runs on a minimal PHP/Apache/Mysql setup (cheap hosting) - It has a great backward compatibly, unl…
Wagtail is looking really, really good. It runs on Django, which is a turn-off for some, but in terms of a friendly, dynamic CMS for editors, it’s shaping up really well.
I agree with you. Our agency (25-30 staff, New Zealand based) recently moved to Wagtail as our preferred CMS. We had contemplated cloud-based solutions (Contentful, Prismic), but a key requirement for many of our clients is to run the solution on their own infrastructure.
The response from our customers (both editors and I.T. teams) has been really positive. For us, Wagtail strikes a nice balance of editor happiness and developer pragmatism.
Since making the move mid-2014, we've implemented Wagtail websites for a bank, an NGO, and some of our private-sector customers. We've built a directory of wagtail websites and developers over at http://madewithwagtail.org/.
It's worth noting that the community is very helpful, and the module ecosystem is growing. There's an API, a static site generator, and a bunch of third-party field types for the editor. Torchbox, Wagtail's developers, are generous with their time and expertise, and we've been able to contribute back to the platform in meaningful ways. A big +1 from me.