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Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

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Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#51

Post by sonicanatidae »

jshwlkr wrote: post #46
sonicanatidae wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you manage every Wordpress site out there, you're biased. YOU, are a technical person and understand the value of updates, vetting plugins, etc, yet a majority of these sites aren't run by people like you/me. They are run by end users, with all of the baggage. You have a point, to an extent. I wholly disagree with your stance on WP though. It's got issues, numerous issues, and a majority of the sites aren't pr…

I don't understand your argument. Are you trying to suggest WP isn't safe or WP isn't easy?

Both.

You're worried about your fleet and that's great. I'm more concerned with the internet as a whole and Wordpress is just vuln after vuln.

I'm happy your systems are secure. That's great.

Unfortunately, that doesn't apply to the 1000s of installations done by amateurs, lax IT, etc. etc. that make the WP vulns a much bigger issue than the 300 you manage.

Manage on, friend.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#52

Post by FireBeyond »

josefresco wrote: post #14

Clever title, not a lot of meat here. I have this same reaction whenever I try a new tool. How do I do this? Does it require an addon? What are the upgrades? All pretty basic 101 stuff for a new user. When I jump from WordPress to Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, I have all the same questions and frustrations.

Promising potential.

> June 9, 2023

> This post is the first in a three-part series about migrating from a self-built PHP-based Laravel backend to a managed WordPress backend.

Cool...

> But it’s still worth it. Find out next week part two in this series, same bat-time, same bat-website…

Excellent. Let's go find parts two and three!

Oh. There is no part two. Or three.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#53

Post by carlosjobim »

josefresco wrote: post #12
sonicanatidae wrote: post #7

Let's not forget the horrific number and level of vulns identified in WordPress.

I manage a network of 300+ WordPress sites. These vulnerabilities, are they in the room with you now? I'm joking of course but like Windows, WordPress is attacked because it's ubiquitous. Yet, here I am running a network of 300 sites with over 600 deferent plugins and hundreds of themes over a span of almost a decade without major issue. How is this possible? Should I pick some obscure CMS instead? (aka security thro…

I'd say WordPress is worst in class for security, compared with all other software and all operating systems. WordPress even has a hidden folder for hackers to put plugins that will not show to administrators, unless you go browsing the file system! I've never encountered any worse software than WordPress for security and usability, and I doubt it is just because of it being everywhere.

It is amazing how much time and effort in the world that has been lost because somehow it became the standard.

Quality WYSIWYG editors and hosting tools will come back with a vengeance soon. As soon as austerity and efficiency returns to the economy.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#54

Post by mbakke »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #30

As someone who is on a, uh, "sabbatical" from programing after 10 years making WP work for gov, edu, and various businesses I have worked on many hundreds of WP sites. I still use it for my personal blog and for marketing my various projects. The article doesn't have a lot of meat, but I think the title alone was interesting. My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software. Leaving…

> My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software.

Why is that a an issue? Sounds like WP has solved a problem that an entire industry has wanted to achieve since the invention of the GPL.

Red Hat also sells GPL software. The problem for them is that customers are simply rebranding Red Hat at a cheaper price point, becoming competitors.

I'm kind of surprised this is not happening in WordPress land.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#55

Post by scarecrowbob »

mbakke wrote: post #54
scarecrowbob wrote: post #30

As someone who is on a, uh, "sabbatical" from programing after 10 years making WP work for gov, edu, and various businesses I have worked on many hundreds of WP sites. I still use it for my personal blog and for marketing my various projects. The article doesn't have a lot of meat, but I think the title alone was interesting. My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software. Leaving…

> My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software. Why is that a an issue? Sounds like WP has solved a problem that an entire industry has wanted to achieve since the invention of the GPL. Red Hat also sells GPL software. The problem for them is that customers are simply rebranding Red Hat at a cheaper price point, becoming competitors. I'm kind of surprised this is not happening in…

Except it doesn't really solve the problem.

You might as well just have whatever normal for-pay license. The reason it is an issue is that not just that it's not legitimate GPL (which is ethically wrong to me- it's literally stealing from a community).

The issue is that it splits up the repos which messes with the upgrade structure. That's fine until you get a security issue and the community can't collectively update to mitigate the issue until the people using the software have paid for their liceneses.

To your point about rebranding stuff, people do that but it's not discussed often in the community. Personally, I feel like white-labeling people software sounds like a community service.

But there really isn't any money in that and it's shunned by the community, so you get a lot of malware created (which is, once again, a problem created by the culture around selling GPL software as if it were closed-source).

Anyhow, other than a few large plugins, the people making real money in the space are doing custom work and leveraging the open source, which is the "real" solution and what folks are doing in other ecosystems as far as I can tell. There are plenty of folks making money off "commercial" WP plugins, but IME that's not the main source of income into the economy around WP.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#56

Post by scarecrowbob »

mdgrech23 wrote: post #38
scarecrowbob wrote: post #30

As someone who is on a, uh, "sabbatical" from programing after 10 years making WP work for gov, edu, and various businesses I have worked on many hundreds of WP sites. I still use it for my personal blog and for marketing my various projects. The article doesn't have a lot of meat, but I think the title alone was interesting. My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software. Leaving…

I started my career on Wordpress. In a lot of ways it was where I learned to program. I'm surprised you stuck w/ it as long as you did, guessing the cash must of been pretty good. To me once you're deep into the internals and writing your own plug-ins you might as well just build something custom. I think it's a good middle ground for someone technical and willing to put in a lot of time but not the know how to truly…

Indeed, money was okay and I was remote and fullt time w/ 30-hours and benefits for 7 years of that. I asked for a raise given the economy and was denied, so f- it :D Now that my kids are grown I can afford to be a sound engineer and musician.

If I were introducing young folks into building stuff for the web (and I am considering doing that locally), WP would be my platform of choice for the reasons that you state. It really isn't bad if you are doing mostly what it is designed to do. It's got a lot of horrible parts to the code base, but if you never have to touch them (and there is a lot of equally shitty code written to aid in that effort) then it doesn't really matter.

However, if you're integrating an ERP and a SSO system that has many thousands of users, it gets to be a bit hairy. You're correct that at a certain point a wholly custom solution makes sense. But if the shop where you're working is married to WP because that is where all the success stories they know how to tell live, then WP it will be.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#57

Post by scarecrowbob »

jrm4 wrote: post #34
scarecrowbob wrote: post #30

As someone who is on a, uh, "sabbatical" from programing after 10 years making WP work for gov, edu, and various businesses I have worked on many hundreds of WP sites. I still use it for my personal blog and for marketing my various projects. The article doesn't have a lot of meat, but I think the title alone was interesting. My primary issue with the WP ecosystem is how folks end up paying for GPL software. Leaving…

That's kind of weird, the whole thing strikes me as a reasonable fudge around the GPL (which I agree is incredibly important.) Do your homework in the ecosystem and you can get that experience, or just pay to get around it seems reasonable, if definitely not ideal?

Yeah, that's a legitimate point of view.

I've seen enough cases where folks have paid to "get around" some problem and it's ended very poorly, often require extensive work that could have been don correctly the first time with some bespoke code instead of many layers of kludges.

Could just be a problem with low-rent software dev in general, but the plugin ecosystem doesn more harm than good in that area, at least IME.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#58

Post by Gazoo101 »

karaterobot wrote: post #10

Counterpoint: I've had a Wordpress blog for almost 20 years, I've never paid anyone a dime. I don't know PHP, and I only use two plugins, both of them free. With a little bit of Googling you can just hack together whatever you need, because there is a lot of documentation for Wordpress. The author is a web dev, so I'm surprised their first thought was that they needed a plugin to load a font.

Do you manage the Wordpress blog installation yourself?

As part 2 will detail, the whole purpose of switching to Wordpress was to reduce the work load of building/maintaining the site. I fully agree, Wordpress is swimming in tutorials, docs, and sometimes guides disguised as advertisements for a paid theme.

Re. changing fonts - My actual first thought was 'Surely I just need to find the settings in WP that let's me change the theme's font', and my experience was that Wordpress did not 'natively' support this.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#59

Post by Gazoo101 »

FireBeyond wrote: post #52
josefresco wrote: post #14

Clever title, not a lot of meat here. I have this same reaction whenever I try a new tool. How do I do this? Does it require an addon? What are the upgrades? All pretty basic 101 stuff for a new user. When I jump from WordPress to Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, I have all the same questions and frustrations.

Promising potential. > June 9, 2023 > This post is the first in a three-part series about migrating from a self-built PHP-based Laravel backend to a managed WordPress backend. Cool... > But it’s still worth it. Find out next week part two in this series, same bat-time, same bat-website… Excellent. Let's go find parts two and three! Oh. There is no part two. Or three.

A fair point - I had the intention of publishing them all together and got distracted. I thought I'd share the post here, as I now actually do have all the parts lined up and will have them ready within the next 2 weeks.

Happy to ping you with them if you're still keen.

Re: Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

#60

Post by Gazoo101 »

jrm4 wrote: post #29

Tell me you don't understand the difficulty of maintaining a really useful and complex free tool without...you know. All the writer has done here is screamed their ignorance (which, to be fair, is not at all simple) of the complexities of using free/open source and also maintaining something huge and complex WITHOUT being huge jerks about it. I do wish there was a simpler way to essentially do two tiers of "service"…

I find Wordpress on the whole incredibly useful and the functionality it does offer is great, not complex.

My issue is with the omission of what I perceive to be some basic and universally useful features. What's basic is - of course - subjective, and you're welcome to disagree.

As noted in my article, I share your preference with a basic paid tier just to get in the door.

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