Putting all eggs in one basket is scary. Putting all eggs in a PHP powered basket is terrifying beyond words.
We're doomed :-(
WordPress now runs a quarter of the web
51–60 of 114 posts
Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web
#52Any consultants on here that have to deliver/maintain WordPress sites? If so, mind sharing what your basic workflow is? There are many articles on the web, but they are mostly for very entry level users. The fundamental problem my company runs into with WP is that only a theme can be meaningfully checked into version control. Everything else, including installation of plugins is coupled with entries in the database.…
I worked briefly for a wordpress consultancy last year.
Our main workflow involved using Yeoman, Grunt, NPM, wp (the wordpress command line tool) and vagrant. Locally, we'd run vagrant just so we don't have to monkey around with environment issues (too much). Yeoman, grunt, npm and wp were used in tandem to script the creation of a new wordpress install, install any dependencies needed, run any tools needed through grunt (like sass and JS minifiers), and pull plugins and themes from their separate git repositories. We still had to import the database by hand, though, when setting up our environment as well as add lines to wp-config for however we wanted to handle debugging.
Then we'd write code and check it in via git as with any other project. If you were working on frontend anything (html,css,js) you either ran grunt all the damned time or ran grunt watch. Those of us who had a hard time with the unique programming requirements of wordpress (escaping, sanitizing, formatting) used phpcs to automate that.
As for deployment, we'd just go through the same setup on the server that we do locally. Updates were pushed via git.
The fundamental problem my company runs into with WP is that only a theme can be meaningfully checked into version control. Everything else, including installation of plugins is coupled with entries in the database.
That wasn't my experience. We separated functional features into separate plugins (so they could be disabled or enabled on a site by site basis) and had no problem using version control with them. In fact, one project had some government security problems and required each plugin to be in its own repo. I wouldn't suggest that, but it works.
the database also includes changes necessarily made on the production instance, like comments to blog posts
That was something I found aggravating that was never really addressed at the company I worked at. When new people were brought on to a project, they'd get a mysql dump of the staging environment. After that, as new features were added, you were responsible for adding your own test data to see if those features worked. As for production, the changes made that were specific to the production database were made manually in production. When a new plugin was pushed, you had to log into the production instances manually and turn the new plugin on. Luckily, there are hooks you can use to automate any setup or teardown of plugins when they get turned on and off respectively.
Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web
#53WordPress is like the Kalashnikov of the web. You can use it for pretty much anything, run it anywhere, do god knows what to it and it'll still happy hum along (albeit behind a very big varnish cache). A few of our clients have millions of pageviews running off of a couple t2.small instances and the single biggest factor for them is the UI and the security of knowing they're not tied into a bespoke platform.
If everything is cached, sure, serving static content is cheap. The comparison with a solid machine I find it funny, a bad update in a plug-in can render your site useless for a while and WP's security record is abysmal.
Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web
#54WordPress is like the Kalashnikov of the web. You can use it for pretty much anything, run it anywhere, do god knows what to it and it'll still happy hum along (albeit behind a very big varnish cache). A few of our clients have millions of pageviews running off of a couple t2.small instances and the single biggest factor for them is the UI and the security of knowing they're not tied into a bespoke platform.
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Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web
#55WordPress is like the Kalashnikov of the web. You can use it for pretty much anything, run it anywhere, do god knows what to it and it'll still happy hum along (albeit behind a very big varnish cache). A few of our clients have millions of pageviews running off of a couple t2.small instances and the single biggest factor for them is the UI and the security of knowing they're not tied into a bespoke platform.
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Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web
#56The total economic activity attributable to WordPress must be staggering. How many small businesses use it? How many consultants and design firms? Even the business of creating WordPress themes must be very significant.
> Even the business of creating WordPress themes must be very significant. It is, lots of people make full-time livings doing it, and even have entire companies set up to do it.
Themes like Divi seem to compete directly with things like Squarespace, including custom WYSIWYG layout tools etc.
http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/divi/
Here's a testimonial from an independent web site creator that I found interesting.
http://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/customer-spotlight/creatin...
(I have no affiliation at all with this nor any other WordPress business, I just think it's interesting—as a counterpoint to the stereotypical HN focus on fancy new technology—how enormously productive this ecosystem really is.)
> One day, as I was in the process of writing a post for inspireddad.org, I had a sudden epiphany. I thought to myself, WordPress is not like any other website builder I have used before. It is powerful, simple, and can be used for almost anything… and I can see myself making a living off of this one day. It was this thought that set me into motion, and I began learning everything I possibly could about WordPress—I became obsessed. [...]
> I honestly believe I might have given up on this dream if it hadn’t been for the amazing support that the ET team gave to me early on. This support, coupled with my own growing WordPress knowledge, enabled me the opportunity to launch approximately two dozen websites in my first year—which gave me the confidence I needed to take my business to the next level. [...]
> The incredible support and products of [Elegant Themes] have enabled me the chance to do what I love—achieving an entrepreneurial lifestyle that has allowed me to truly help my clients, while also giving my family my time and attention as a husband and father.
I'm half tempted to abandon my current plans of startup world domination and just make WordPress websites for local businesses.
Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web
#57I agree entirely with the premise that WordPress is not the most impressive codebase in the world — but that's not why people select it. The reason that sites opt to use WordPress is that the editorial interface is familiar and the plugin ecosystem is very robust. The reason that sites stay on WordPress is that upgrades arrive for free every couple of months and do not break backwards compatibility. WordPress's perfo…
> the plugin ecosystem is very robust It's not true, a lot of WP plugins are buggy and sometimes conflict each other. > upgrades arrive for free every couple of months and do not break backwards compatibility But sometimes plugins break with upgrades
Paid plugins (with support) are the way to go for getting the highest quality and I've had great experiences with them. Some of the ones I've had great luck with on my site are Advanced Custom Fields, Gravity Forms, and most recently FacetWP.
Edit: that said, there are also high quality free ones as well
Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web
#58I recently looked at Hugo[1] as a WP alternative and have been very impressed. It's a static website generator written in Go and features its own server with live-reload so you can see changes to your content instantly in the browser. I was looking for something that a non-techie might be able to maintain and since Hugo offers prebuilt binaries the only requirements for the maintainer is to drop hugo.exe into the wor…
Considering some of the people I've made wordpress sites for couldn't even figure out the wordpress interface, command line anything is a no go for a large percentage of wordpress's intended audience.
Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web
#59That sounds scary considering the fact that Wordpress security flaws make it "remote system administration tool" first, and blog platform second.
citation needed
The problem with wordpress security is mostly attached the insecure developer practices when dealing with themes. Many developers just take a standard theme, copies it, and then attach their own modifications. This piece of code never gets updated and the owner rarely even know that its there until they get hacked, reinstall with a updated wordpress, and then get rehacked a few days later.
Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web
#60i kind of wonder how did we get to this point. technologically speaking it's a disaster - terrible slow and insecure language as a platform for bad practices and codr base. i guess the answer is that technical excellence.is absolutely secondary to other concerns, but it's a concerning view.
There may be other technical solutions that are better from a technology POV. What WP did right is to choose a platform supported EVERYWHERE (PHP, and not Ruby, Java or other crap only supported by few hosters), with a shitload of developers (again, the massive advantage of PHP), and packed the installation process in a way everyone from an 8-year old school kid to a 70-year old grandpa can handle (and literally, I h…
> What WP did right is to choose a platform supported EVERYWHERE
When WP was created, their options were PHP or Perl. PHP was by far the hottest thing back then, so what they actually did was use the hot tech of the day and made it work. The reason PHP is supported everywhere is for the same reason; back then it was PHP or Perl via CGI. Python was added later and was also supported EVERYWHERE.