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Ghost — rethinking WordPress

john.onolan.org

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Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#231

Post by ringmaster »

wildmXranat wrote: post #143
ringmaster wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, let me say this: I love what you've done with the Ghost design. I think it's clean and useful. More on this below... I am one of the early contributors to WordPress (you'll see my name on wp.org's About page near the bottom), and one of the founders of the Habari Project. We started the Habari Project for many explicit reasons, but in part because the curators of the project (Automattic) were not behaving in a…

I looked at the code, installed a test site and read the Wiki. Is this project on a down low at the moment with only 19 commits and low activity since late last year ? Also, when you mention that you manage to pay the bills with development of habari powered sites, do you draw from a community need for habari developers or are these clients that you persuade to use habari ? I'm curious about the overall community and…

In my work, clients mostly need a site built to perform a specific function, and if Habari fits that task, I use it. There isn't an explicit demand for Habari developers, but there is a high demand for sites that Habari is suited to produce, which overlaps a bit with WordPress' capabilities.

As others mentioned, the main habari/habari repo commit count is low because the main development doesn't happen there, but in a submodule'd repo, habari/system. The purpose of this is to allow you to easily fork the main repo to add your own plugins and themes to it, while the submodule continues to pull from the system repo. It's very beneficial from a maintenance standpoint.

I'm not sure how to explain the community. My involvement has been nothing but beneficial for me, and it has been a similar experience for the people I know the community has touched. Development has been reasonably continuous, as you can see here: http://www.ohloh.net/p/habari

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#233

Post by hperkins »

pjbrunet wrote: post #154
kmfrk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when you consider that there are people whose only viewport is mobile devices.

Screen size limitation is a temporary setback. After Google Glasses we'll have unlimited space. As far as the eye can see.

Yes, because millions of people have $1,500 laying around to solve a software problem with expensive hardware. I sort of contradict myself though, since that's what large sites are already doing with WordPress.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#234

Post by danneu »

pessimism wrote: post #229
danneu wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My cheatsheet was a simple condensed table of "this | produces this" beneath the post textfield. Also, other communities that deal with a similar audience had the same problem with Markdown and moved back to BBCode. For example, these guys ( http://guildwork.com/forum/threads/4e46f3d5205cb22721000765-... ) moved from BBCode to Markdown and then ended up moving back and writing their own BBCode parser in Python. Markd…

That’s a great point about the inherent ability to extend the number of tags that isn’t inherently present in Markdown. I am currently writing a forum CMS ( http://pygm.us/IbkgNZ4d ), and I, too, have wondered how to expand the number of tags within a rigid nomenclature. Using a lexer that automatically converts links to tweets and YouTube videos to embedded scripts seems like an unintuitive solution, but on the othe…

Cool project.

Lots of vBulletin forums use the `::` syntax because vBulletin's default smilie set ships with that form of syntax (even though you can use arbitrary strings like setting "lol" to display a laughing gif) so everyone just piles onto it. Basically, direct string replacement seems to be universally understood by all users.

But the real riddle here is devising a syntax superior to bbcode that transcends string replacement and does things like take arguments and act like functions.

Because, it's this less-straightforward symbolism that requires the higher order of savviness/pattern-recognition that less-experienced users struggle with. Like `![]()` turning into an image (but not `! []()`) or why you'd need to indent 4 spaces to resume a bullet point after an empty line.

In other words, where you and I may find it obvious that we're conforming to the rules of a parser (on some back-of-the-mind intuition at least), I found that this concept of mechanical recognition is nonobvious to the user archetype that expressed confusion over Markdown. To them, `! []()` doesn't work because of a negative rule "there can't be a space", not because the token is simply no longer recognizable to the robot behind the curtains that renders their post. That's the crux I've arrived at that makes Markdown suboptimal for my particular community demographic.

The final point I discovered is that users almost always use the toolbar button for anything that comes from their clipboard (namely image and website URLs). Click, paste, and done. Even on smartphones. So essentially all Markdown did there was take cumbersome syntax that was seldom typed-in to begin with and replace it with less intuitive syntax for a benefit that was seldom awarded: being easier to type! Users then had to confront the `[]()` beast when editing posts or modifying their post's layout.

Fun stuff to ponder. It's always extremely eye-opening and humbling to be so wrong.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#235

Post by ShaneGowland »

papsosouid wrote: post #224
photomatt wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's sort of like saying Facebook scaling is a "non-issue" because it's just a bunch of small, independent profile pages. Of course some elements can and should be sharded, but that doesn't mean that scaling is trivial, especially as you get into more advanced and social features and a rapidly increasing percentage of traffic is logged in and fully dynamic. I think we agree that "scaling" small (sub-RAM-size) amoun…

Except that as I pointed out, facebook isn't independent pages. Wordpress.com is tons of tiny, entirely independent sites. That's like claiming godaddy is a top 10 website because they host tons of little PHP sites. Tons of little sites is not the same as one big site. I realize lots of people run wordpress. That doesn't support the claim that it easily scales to the traffic demands of a top 10 site.

That's incorrect. WordPress.com serves hundreds of thousands of websites from a single install. That means one set of PHP files and one database. Not unlike Facebook.

Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress

#236

Post by papsosouid »

ShaneGowland wrote: post #235
papsosouid wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that as I pointed out, facebook isn't independent pages. Wordpress.com is tons of tiny, entirely independent sites. That's like claiming godaddy is a top 10 website because they host tons of little PHP sites. Tons of little sites is not the same as one big site. I realize lots of people run wordpress. That doesn't support the claim that it easily scales to the traffic demands of a top 10 site.

That's incorrect. WordPress.com serves hundreds of thousands of websites from a single install. That means one set of PHP files and one database. Not unlike Facebook.

It is entirely correct. First of all, they do not serve hundreds of thousands in one install. Second, it doesn't matter. The point is they are individual sites, they are not tied to each other in any way. So lets say they host 100 sites on server X. Now one of those sites explodes in popularity and the server can't handle it all. They can simply move the site to its own server (or a server shared with a smaller number of other sites). It doesn't matter that the data is currently in the same database, as the data is in no way tied to the data of the other sites in that database. So it can be trivially exported and moved to a different server.
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