WooThemes joins Automattic • Hacker News Board

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#41

Post by aikah » Tue, May 19, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

Of course, but it is in my opinion a consequence of the stable plugin/theme api wordpress has (point 3)

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#42

Post by atonse » Tue, May 19, 2015, 8:54 PM UTC

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.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#43

Post by smacktoward » Tue, May 19, 2015, 8:55 PM UTC

> 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 is that it's horrible in terms of various things that matter to you -- things like a clean database schema and freedom from legacy code. But what's most important to you is not necessarily what's most important to everyone else, and it turns out that for lots of people ease of use and simple installation on cheap commodity hosting are much more important than what things look like under the hood.

We as developers tend to forget this a lot -- we look at popular products that are technically funky and think "how on earth can that be popular?" But the answer is usually just a reminder that we're not really representative of the market for software in general; we care about things that nobody else does, and are willing to put up with pain points nobody else would.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#44

Post by codegeek » Tue, May 19, 2015, 8:57 PM UTC

I am working a lot with wordpress lately and let me tell you, it blows my mind too when I see so many clients/businesses using it even though as developers, we see "shitty core with that db schema" as you called it. But then if you continue to think about it, the reason wordpress is so successful is not just because of the ease of installation etc, it is because of the eco-system it has created. I have looked at a few closed source CMS's and in fact been thinking of building my own from scratch, but I keep going back to WP for CMS. It just works and so many clients are already using it or at least "heard" of it.

You can literally setup a decent working website in a day with WP. Want to create pages in WYSIWYG ? Done. Want to manage users ? Done. Wnat to add your social icons ? Oh, there is a plugin for that which is rated by 1000s of other clients. Want to sell stuff ? Np. Add the famous "woocommerce" plugin and you are on your way.

Ok, I made it sound simpler than it can be for users but as developers, it is absolute pleasure when I can setup a client in hours using wordpress and they are on their way.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#45

Post by MichaelTieso » Tue, May 19, 2015, 8:57 PM UTC

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 and their talented group.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#46

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 19, 2015, 8:59 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#47

Post by tacone » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:03 PM UTC

Quite frankly, Drupal 7 is a complete nightmare. It's so heavy it has to cache aggressively for even the basic DB operations, and you'll get Mb's of cache in exchange of nothing. The DB schema is so structured that even exporting a table content is extremely difficult to do in plain SQL. You often find PHP code stored in the DB, so taking over a former contractor is pretty hard. The code style is as old school as Wordpress, and so on.

If I had to, I would choose Wordpress over Drupal every day.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#48

Post by Domenic_S » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:07 PM UTC

Here's something crazy to me about WP - it stores the site's domain in the database. This makes it incredibly obnoxious to set up a local environment of a live site (or automated CI environments with arbitrary subdomains). I had to hack together a bash script to fire UPDATEs to the db to modify these values.

Drupal on the other hand looks for /sites/$DOMAIN/settings.php, and there's nothing domain-specific in that file (except $base_url, which is optional). Orders of magnitude easier to deal with.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#49

Post by nedwin » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:07 PM UTC

eCommerce overall http://trends.builtwith.com/shop Trending up and to the right http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/WooCommerce

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#50

Post by jcurbo » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:12 PM UTC

I was interested too (as a former school IT admin), a little googling turned up this:

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/08/01/37erate.h33.htm...

E-Rate is a major funding source for school Internet connections and is ran by the FCC. The sidebar on that article says:

"Phases out support for some non-broadband services, such as voice services; and eliminates support for others, such as email, Web-hosting, paging, and components of telephone service such as text-messaging and directory assistance."

I'm guessing it relates to that "web-hosting" bit.