Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WooThemes joins Automattic

woothemes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 159 posts

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#141

Post by waqas- »

damoncali wrote: post #53
aikah wrote: post #37

I'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 also works because customers have heard of it and believe that they can edit the sites themselves (in spite of your warnings), so it's much easier to sell. "We'll just put you on WordPress!". Done. Of course, they never figure out how to edit the site, because the WYSIWYG editor is anything but, and even the text editor "enhances" the html you type in inexplicably. They don't know the difference between a post and…

if your clients cant understand the difference between post and page after 5 minutes of explaining, they are clearly nincompoops and no cms will ever be able to put them out of their misery.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#142

Post by coldtea »

codygman wrote: post #101
coldtea wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WordPress' API and its limitations are so annoying that I just can't imagine developing for this platform unless you desperately need money. Yes, it's for professionals. Hobbyists can always use some Haskell web framework.

Implying API limitation and annoyance means professional... Yuck. Professionals can also use a Haskell web framework. Increasingly so for their day jobs, at least in my case.

>Implying API limitation and annoyance means professional... Yuck.

Yep. One of the signs of a professional over a hobbyist is pragmatism in using his tools.

>Professionals can also use a Haskell web framework

Sure, but not by market demand. And they might also be making their clients a diservice by this choice (e.g. making the project difficult to maintain when he leaves etc).

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#143

Post by octatoan »

MichaelTieso wrote: post #45
jbkkd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrulations! This is a great step forward for the community and for both parties involved. As for WooThemes - will we start seeing proper documentation [1] when products are released? I've been bit in the past by something being released by WooThemes, and documentation taking another half year up to year to follow. [1] http://www.omerkorner.com/2014/09/wheres-api-reference-wooco...

You're right. We could have done a better job at documenting the REST API. We've been slowly introducing and fixing issues with the the REST API since it's debut. We never fully announced it as it was still very much a work in progress. However in WC 2.3 I'm happy to announce we've significantly improved the REST API and documentation. Without a doubt we're also going to have many more resources joining Automattic an…

A humble dev is the best kind of dev. :)

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#144

Post by erlend_sh »

ereckers wrote: post #55
aikah wrote: post #37

I'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…

> I've got to ask. If a builder of websites was looking for something that wasn't horrible and built by smart people, which one would that be?

As far as WordPress-contenders go, I think OctoberCMS looks very promising. It's dynamic like WordPress, but it natively supports a Git/SVN workflow, so there's less "behind the scenes magic" going on.

http://octobercms.com/

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#145

Post by woah »

themodelplumber wrote: post #32
wonderyak wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thousands of developers making a living mostly off of WordPress development would probably disagree with you. It's low hanging fruit, not a lot of effort for decent return.

It's a technical debt trap. You dive in with a one-click install and follow up with a bunch of plugins that seem to fit the bill. Then you spend 2-3x more time creating a custom theme for someone than you would in a sensibly-architected CMS, and only then do you begin to realize that maintenance costs down the road are going to be absolutely crazy. Especially when plugins X and Y start requiring a different theming a…

WP is certainly not clean, but it's completely possible to make great sites with it, and it runs a huge number of great sites out there. It sounds like you messed up on a job and are trying to blame someone besides yourself.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#146

Post by mtbcoder »

mdesq wrote: post #94
wmeredith wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an awesome comment. It's like a mechanic saying Chevy's are a nightmare under the hood. The percentage of people buying cars that give a fuck is rapidly approaching zero because they never even see it.

Exactly. It's a free car that a ton of people drive and lots of auto shops work on but that German mechanics think is an embarrassment.

Expanding on your analogy, the issue is when you need to start using your free car to safely haul lots of freight across the country in a timely manner, over multiple routes all while providing sound, reliable fleet maintenance with a team of mechanics. Some auto shops will tell you that duct-taping your freight to the roof of your car is just fine, others will tell you that you cannot run a reliable network with this system.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#147

Post by patrickk »

csomar wrote: post #51
aikah wrote: post #37

I'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…

Gentrification. You can find a theme for $45 that will cost $30K to develop from scratch. You'll find a few plugins that will do exactly what you want that will cost $50k to develop in-house. WordPress is great because you have things that will cost you $xx,xxx to develop and they are already available for you at a minuscule cost.

This is a HUGE factor. You can deploy a website customised to your needs, with almost any look and style imaginable (look at the top rated themes on themeforest for example), without a graphic designer or web developer. I do consulting work installing and setting up Wordpress websites, and I and my clients love it for this reason.

You can get themes for $40-60 that give your site the look of something that would take tens of thousands to develop from scratch.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#148

Post by jdub »

spydum wrote: post #115
Domenic_S wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly there are configuration options that are appropriate to store in the database, but I'm trying to understand why domain is one of them. The site knows what domain it is on by virtue of being hosted on that domain. Storing the domain in the DB may be reasonable if it's done once, but WP does it multiple times: WP_SITEURL ("the address where your WordPress core files reside"), WP_HOME ("the address you want pe…

You aren't missing anything. This problem has been there in WP for a long time, and it makes staging/testing/migration setups a horrible pain (as others have suggested, lots of search & replace).

It's two constants in your dev environment wp-config.php, nothing more.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#149

Post by lightlyused »

mdesq wrote: post #94
wmeredith wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an awesome comment. It's like a mechanic saying Chevy's are a nightmare under the hood. The percentage of people buying cars that give a fuck is rapidly approaching zero because they never even see it.

Exactly. It's a free car that a ton of people drive and lots of auto shops work on but that German mechanics think is an embarrassment.

Then you have the massive recall because using it could kill you.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#150

Post by Jgrubb »

atonse wrote: post #42
aikah wrote: post #37

I'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…

Drupal has that added "benefit" of not being the least bit intuitive to use in any way shape or form unless your brain is wired a certain way. I've experienced this, and have met at least a dozen people of varied skills who feel the same. So Drupal, like Oracle, is a consultant's dream. Your clients will have to keep coming back to you because the system is so damn complicated to do really basic things.

> So Drupal, like Oracle, is a consultant's dream.

After 7 years of full-time Drupal, I'm pretty convinced that it's intended to be a wealth extraction tool first and a CMS tool second.

"You can build a website with no code! Impress and sell your boss on it in a day! Get far enough down the road to not be able to back out and then spend the next several years of your life trying to hire insanely expensive developers to write all the code you need to write to make your moderately complex functionality needs actually come to life."

Post reply on HN