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WooThemes joins Automattic

woothemes.com

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Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#81

Post by EGreg »

aikah wrote: post #37

I'm fascinated by Wordpress success. 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 : - Ease of installation - It runs on a minimal PHP/A…

I get that Wordpress is more of a "platform" businesses can build products upon, but who would really want to build on that shitty core,with that db schema?

A lot of people, obviously. You said it yourself.

Many of us have read opinion articles from 30 years ago about how much Unix sucks, or Windows sucks. But they became widespread for a number of reasons -- which led to app developers wanting to develop for that ecosystem. Same here. Wordpress is GPL and runs on almost all hosting providers. The economic incentives to develop commercial and non-commercial themes and plugins for that ecosystem are obvious.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#82

Post by taylorbuley »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #77
konsptheory wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Ghost or Jekyll anyway better in terms of tech and other business factors? I'm genuinely asking here :)

I have handed the CMS keys for Ghost to non-technical people with good results. There's no doubt that it's more limited (especially in terms of plugin ecosystem) than WP, but that lack feels liberating. No need to agonize over which contact form plugin is the right one to go with, etc. And Ghost is certainly snappy [0]. [0]: http://blog.appdynamics.com/nodejs/an-example-of-how-node-js...

Custom code is great if you have staff programmers. If you do not, one of the upsides to WordPress is letting end customers - not the programmers - agonize over which plugins to use.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#84

Post by codegeek »

damoncali wrote: post #80
coldtea wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That hasn't been my experience with tens of sites and tons of clients I've known. Simple, non IT people, can edit the sites and change content VERY easily. Oh, and of course MILLIONS of people edit their own posts for their blogs in the hosted word…

BS is s pretty strong word. I would suggest that maybe you have different clients than I do. Most of mine throw their hands up very quickly and just have me do it - if they even try. Maybe 50% don't ever attempt to. Things like adding images and links are a challenge for them, especially when canned themes are involved. Some do fine with just plain text. Most don't. But all in all, most of my clients don't want to ev…

In that case, I would argue that wordpress is not the issue here. It is your client base that does not want to manage their own website which means they are not ideal wordpress users because wordpress as a CMS means that you the user can at least do some content management yourself.

I have come across many potential clients who say "can you do it all for me, i don't want to do anything" and personally for me, they are not good fits to use wordpress. But when someone says "look I just need an easy to use interface to manage my website, content", then I give them wordpress.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#85

Post by mcintyre1994 »

dubcanada wrote: post #36
erlend_sh wrote: post #2

That's pretty clever. They're buying WooCommerce, one of the leading eCommerce platforms.

Where are you getting your stats from? I'm interested in the source for said speculation.

From the article :

> here we find ourselves powering over 24% of online stores with our flagship product, WooCommerce

That seems pretty impressive and means they're definitely a top player.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#86

Post by damoncali »

codegeek wrote: post #84
damoncali wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BS is s pretty strong word. I would suggest that maybe you have different clients than I do. Most of mine throw their hands up very quickly and just have me do it - if they even try. Maybe 50% don't ever attempt to. Things like adding images and links are a challenge for them, especially when canned themes are involved. Some do fine with just plain text. Most don't. But all in all, most of my clients don't want to ev…

In that case, I would argue that wordpress is not the issue here. It is your client base that does not want to manage their own website which means they are not ideal wordpress users because wordpress as a CMS means that you the user can at least do some content management yourself. I have come across many potential clients who say "can you do it all for me, i don't want to do anything" and personally for me, they ar…

I think you misunderstand what I'm trying to say.

WordPress is great for them. They want WordPress because it makes them comfortable to know they are on a "standard platform". They can hire someone else to maintain it if I get hit by a bus. So it's very easy for me to sell, and hosting companies like Flywheel (https://getflywheel.com) make it very easy to maintain. That was the point I was making - Wordpress is great for business. But, compared to other systems I have used, I find it technically very clumsy.

Usually, clients don't really realize they don't want to touch the site until it's in front of them. If I were certain that they would never want to edit before I started, I would be far less inclined to use WordPress, but might anyhow just because of the hosting/maintenance situation and the brand. I get tired of getting emails asking if I've updated the site for the latest high profile security patch. With Wordpress, I can pretty much ignore them with a quick "got it covered" response, because the (good) hosting companies fix this stuff before the clients are generally aware of it. At worst, I log in and click a button. That's great.

So really, I like WordPress, but only because it makes me money and saves me time. Everything else about it is fairly awful to me. I hate working with it. I hate developing in it. I hate that I have to wade through a sea of crappy plugins to find one that is suitable. And, easy as it is for you and I to edit, it's just too complicated for many of my clients. Sure, some of them are fine with it. But more often the CMS winds up being for me, not them.

This is all just my personal experience slogging through this stuff for the past several years. Milage may vary.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#87

Post by mgkimsal »

jwdunne wrote: post #78
wmeredith wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For some of the websites I have had to maintain in Joomla, it would be much more efficient for the company if I converted to Wordpress and the writers use that. Wordpress is easy to use. With plugins, such as advanced custom fields, you can do even more. I've impressed many clients with how easy to use the "website's CMS" in turn around times they have never experienced before. The code is shocking. The plugin archit…

> It's just impossible to match it with the number of extensions

It's almost precisely because there's very little uniformity between anything.

It's often much more efficient to just install a new wordpress, migrate some content over and start 'fresh' than it is to modify an existing theme with new functionality; just find a different theme that does what you want and migrate your content and images over to that.

That said, I seem to remember drupal's CCK impressing me some time ago - if that was a default option (IIRC at the time it was a separate plugin) that might have done more for Drupal's "configurability ease" story early on. But.. I may be misremembering with rose-colored glasses.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#88

Post by Domenic_S »

MichaelTieso wrote: post #71
Domenic_S wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never had good luck with that. Some generated URLs still use the DB value and so forth. Perhaps it's an indictment of plugin developers vs WP core. I still cannot think of a good reason for that value to be in the DB at all.

I won't go into detail on that here but know that there's a very good reason for it. Plugin and theme developers should be using for example `esc_url( home_url( '/' ) );` when requiring the URL of the site.

Ok, as someone who's battled with this... feature... of WP I am super curious as to the very good reason for storing the domain in the DB. Why couldn't links be relative (no need to know the domain), or set only as a sitewide variable in wp-config.php?

edit: and just discovered the 'guid' column on the posts table is hardcoded as the URL of the post -- the domain you're on at the time you create the content + the post ID. Seems like a nightmare for content staging on a non-prod environment.

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#89

Post by mgkimsal »

aikah wrote: post #37

I'm fascinated by Wordpress success. 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 : - Ease of installation - It runs on a minimal PHP/A…

If more PHP "frameworks" had come with a standard registration/login/password reset system, and a semblance of an administration system that could be customized, Wordpress likely would not have achieved such dominance in the period it did. The PHPNuke family almost had it, but focused too much on copying slashdot vs being a bit more open-ended or content-focused.

The alternatives have been "build-your-own" frameworks with hundreds of libraries but nothing out of the box. When I bring this up, I typically get "but everyone's security needs are different". With WP powering 20%+ of the web right now, that's clearly not true. The dominance of a few oauth systems tied to walled-gardens proves that false even moreso; you, mr senior-enterprise-developer might have extremely-specific use cases (CAS tied to legacy Novell supporting IE5, maybe), but the majority of starter apps need self-registration, email, password, maybe cell token or Facebook registration to get started.

Instead, every single person trying to use almost any major PHP framework has to roll their own security from scratch, which is precisely what we also tell people not to do. I can't tell you how many bizarre hand-rolled security systems I've seen over the years in various PHP frameworks. But hey, they all came bundled with top-of-the-line URL routers and templating libraries...

Re: WooThemes joins Automattic

#90

Post by mgkimsal »

csomar wrote: post #51
aikah wrote: post #37

I'm fascinated by Wordpress success. 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 : - Ease of installation - It runs on a minimal PHP/A…

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.

But it must have been great at something else first, because that wasn't the case years ago - it was obviously better at something else some years ago.
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