WooThemes joins Automattic • Hacker News Board

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#51

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

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.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#52

Post by hvs » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:13 PM UTC

Drupal is just as horrible as WP with the added bonus of being complicated. Which is why I choose WP over Drupal (when I have to make that choice).

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#53

Post by damoncali » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:14 PM UTC

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 a page (or a blog for that matter). So they give up, and wind up hiring you to add content too.

Which is great (yay, money!), but now you have to actually work with this monstrosity and you wind up wishing you had used something like middleman or sinatra like a proper gentleman. But deep down you know that would have been a bad idea as well, because they'd call you in three years to fix the outdated mess that became of your beautiful site after years of neglect. And you'll do it despite not wanting to because they won't be able to find someone else who knows how and that will make you feel guilty.

Meanwhile, WordPress just chugs on, smug in it's mediocrity.

It's really a ghastly creation, if you ask me.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#54

Post by Domenic_S » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:14 PM UTC

If you "often" find PHP code in the DB, you're taking over for some godawful contractors. The PHP filter is rarely used and is even being deprecated from D8.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#55

Post by ereckers » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

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, unlike other solutions that break everything with each major version.

The actual, true and documented reason that WordPress has become a blazing success in the CMS space is the ease of use of the backend administration console. This comes from developer and client feedback in poll after poll of WordPress users and developers.

Regarding:

> If one compares with Drupal for instance, I mean with Drupal, a designer can go really really far without writing a single line of PHP code, aside from a few tags for templates(but it's really light). You have views, CCK and a lot of handy stuff.

I've heard Drupal developers themselves actually look to WordPress's method of having the option of handling these things in code/configuration as a net positive. It's trackable and portable.

--

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?

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#56

Post by macNchz » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

>one cannot customize Wordpress without writing more than a few php tags

The tags you need to know to create a basic theme are pretty straightforward, and the market you can reach by learning them is massive: Wordpress is said to power 23% of all websites. If you're a designer who knows HTML and CSS, the learning curve for those templates might be a little bit steeper than for other CMS products, but the number of potential buyers for your theme is dramatically larger.

>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

I've been tasked with making Wordpress do things it never should have done, so in service of that I've read a good chunk of the source and I totally agree with this, some of the code is truly abominable.

On the other hand, of everything I've built that has been handed over to clients for content management, Wordpress-backed sites are the clear winners in terms of how much support is required after delivery.

Smart use of custom post types and custom fields, however hideous the code behind them may be, saves time in development, allows you to build an admin that makes sense to non-technical folks, and helps prevent you from re-inventing the wheel for each and every project. It also means that a pretty huge set of developers will be able to pick up your work later on.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#57

Post by konsptheory » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:21 PM UTC

Is Ghost or Jekyll anyway better in terms of tech and other business factors?

I'm genuinely asking here :)

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#58

Post by lamosty » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:23 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 [...]

I must disagree with these statements. Although it is not the most elegant one I've seen, using the word "horrible" is simply out of place. Have you ever built some sites with it? Do you realize that WordPress is developed in open source with many talented people working on it every day? The DB schema is actually quite flexible, being able to accommodate various kinds of data without many modifications. Apart from that, you can write your own beautiful code according to the newest PHP standards if you want in your WordPress-powered projects. No-one is forcing you to use old versions of PHP.

As far as the success of WP is concerned, I think the reasons for it are very similar to why PHP is successful:

- A huge community with plenty of plugins and themes.

- Supported on basically any hosting service.

- Being free with free updates.

- Refined administration panel with many subtle features like auto-saving posts to Local Storage, which can save your article in case of an accident.

and much more...

I'm not saying that WordPress doesn't have its own issues, however, ignorantly stating that it is "an horrible peace of software" is simply outrageous.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#59

Post by wmeredith » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:25 PM UTC

I was about to point this out exactly. I used to do client training for a small web dev shop on everything from Google Adwords and/or Analytics to Joomla and Drupal. WordPress' admin was head and shoulders above the rest in terms of ease of use. I've always thought that was the keystone of its success.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#60

Post by damoncali » Tue, May 19, 2015, 9:25 PM UTC

No idea about Ghost. I found Jekyll to be too limited for client work - but it's been a good 18 months since I used it.