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WordPress now runs a quarter of the web

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Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web

#61

Post by PopeOfNope »

CM30 wrote: post #22
Mithaldu wrote: post #6

A quarter of all websites includes a LOT of tiny websites nobody visits. How many users/hits/bandwidth of the web does WP get?

Quite a lot, considering that some of these brands use (or used to use) WordPress: http://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/40-most-notable-big-name-... It's fairly common among large media publications.

That's something that gets overlooked in these discussions of wordpress. Wordpress has the unique ability to use a single install and backend to manage hundreds of sites. If you need content cross posted across multiple sites, wordpress can do that. If you want to pull an entire column of articles from one site to another, wordpress can do that.

Wordpress has spent a ton of time on multisite features and (as far as I know) there's no other CMS in existence that handles this stuff out of the box. That's why large media companies love it and, I suspect, why a quarter of the internet runs it still when there are faster and more secure alternatives out there.

Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web

#62

Post by soared »

PopeOfNope wrote: post #58
nogridbag wrote: post #49

I 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.

Hell, FTP is a no go for most of wordpress's audience.

Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web

#63

Post by pizzeys »

coliveira wrote: post #36
picozeta wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your points, but always wonder why shared hosting is often PHP/MySQL only. E.g. if you are using Python, say Django or Flask, and want to outsource your devops (i.e. shared hosting) you do not have many options. Of course, there is pythonanywhere or you might want to use PAAS like Heroku, but I find it interesting non the less. Is it so much more work for shared hosting providers to provide Python?

PHP guys are very smart about not trying to reinvent the wheel. They always supported the most common web setup: Apache running on its standard configuration. That's why every shared host company in the world is confident in deploying PHP and avoids like the plague more complex solutions based on Python, Java, and Rubi.

I'd say it's actually the opposite - the users are comfortable with PHP and not the more complex solutions. I'd love for us to support other stuff, but anyone who is using anything else wants more control over their environment than the average shared host can offer. We have as many deployment issues etc. with PHP as we would anything else... possibly more.

That said, isn't 'IaaS' like Heroku basically 'shared hosting for other stuff'?

Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web

#64

Post by rmdoss »

And WordPress itself is NOT insecure. It is in fact the most secure CMS you can find out there.

The issue is that its simplicity and easy installation, brought a lot of non-technical people to use it and develop for it.

So you get a lot of bad written themes and plugins that lead to all sort of security issues.

On the other hand, Drupal and Joomla, all had SQL injections on their core discovered lately:

https://www.drupal.org/SA-CORE-2014-005

https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/10/joomla-3-4-5-released-fixing...

Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web

#65

Post by e12e »

mbrock wrote: post #56
visakanv wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 count…

It's a fascinating ecosystem, but a little confusing. I was hoping there was an easy(ish) way to develop a custom theme, and use wp.com for hosting -- but as far as I've been able to figure out, there's no way to do that -- to use wp.com is to opt out of any serious customization. On the flip side, you get (presumably) rock solid wp hosting, and few security issues.

Every time I've considered wp, I've ended up turning away - the code base is quite awful for the basic features it provides, and as soon as you start adding third party plugins (for added features), you need to be very careful to avoid either breaking on updates, or security issues (with a plugin, or cross section of plugins). It feels like half of the traffic to full-disclosure is related to wp plugins.

I'm not the typical wp customer of course, but for me the ability to develop some fairly static (html+js+css) themes along with wp hosting might have been interesting. If I can't use custom themes, wp.com hosting isn't all that interesting -- and if I have to host it myself, I want something that's a more solid software design than wp (and hopefully maxes out at around a single db query per page view. Something which is easier if you can assume the db has proper views, for example (select * from anonymous_page_view where page_id=?)).

I see that the same is true for the elegantthemes (which appear to be terrific value at ~250 USD for a life-time, unlimited license, btw):

https://www.elegantthemes.com/join.php#wp-com "Can I use your themes with WP.com?"

"Unfortunately WordPress.com does not allow the use of custom themes. If you would like to use a custom theme of any kind, you will need to purchase your own hosting account and install the free software from WordPress.org. If you are looking for great WordPress hosting, we recommend giving HostGator a try."

Yeah, I don't think I'll be suggesting clients to use HostGator as a web host.

Wrt. themes and wp.com -- I can see how I could make a few themes and sell them at an affordable price -- I don't really see how the economics of support works out when you need to deal with the entire gamut of outdated php/mysql versions and the plethora of combinations of server+(f)cgi/php-module+mysql/mariadb/otherdbs(?)+windows/solaris/bsd/linux for support and testing. Not to mention interaction with hundreds of buggy third party wp plugins.

> I'm half tempted to abandon my current plans of startup world domination and just make WordPress websites for local businesses.

Best of luck to you :-)

Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web

#66

Post by gaius »

nogridbag wrote: post #49

I 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…

That you need to know or care about what programming language it's written in, rules it out for 99% of the web's users.

Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web

#67

Post by bprieto »

mrfijal wrote: post #3

i 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.

Technical excellence is usually secondary to anyone except technicians and a few power users. It was the same with VHS/Betamax. The network effect and the set-up cost are much more important for the majority of users than technical excellence.

Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web

#68

Post by e12e »

PopeOfNope wrote: post #58
nogridbag wrote: post #49

I 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.

Yeah, I'm sure it'd be possible to build on top of Hugo (or many other static site generators) to build something that might be usable for the typical wp customer - but afaik none of them are that out of the box. The most likely alternative I can think of is Ghost: https://ghost.org/

But, I'm not sure how easy it is to customize along the lines that people expect from wp (Now, that could be considered a feature - but it also means it could be a hard sell to someone that just wants a wp site).

If what is needed really is a static site (a "web site"/"homepage") -- I think netlifly looks quite promising:

https://www.netlify.com/

Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web

#69

Post by jqm »

rmdoss wrote: post #64

And WordPress itself is NOT insecure. It is in fact the most secure CMS you can find out there. The issue is that its simplicity and easy installation, brought a lot of non-technical people to use it and develop for it. So you get a lot of bad written themes and plugins that lead to all sort of security issues. On the other hand, Drupal and Joomla, all had SQL injections on their core discovered lately: https://www.d…

But it does get an inordinate amount of attention from people looking to crack it. At least according to my server logs. So sure... if everything is locked down and up to date and no shaky plugins installed no problem. On the other hand, one careless slip up...

Re: WordPress now runs a quarter of the web

#70

Post by nogridbag »

gaius wrote: post #66
nogridbag wrote: post #49

I 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…

That you need to know or care about what programming language it's written in, rules it out for 99% of the web's users.

Not sure what you meant by that. I mentioned it was written in Go for the HN crowd. You do not need to know Go to use it. I've never written a Go program in my life and followed the tutorial without any issues.
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