Getting Started With Toto, a Tiny WordPress Killer | Hacker News Reader

Getting Started With Toto, a Tiny WordPress Killer

fadeyev.net

48 pointspuns26 comments

Toto might be a "WordPress Killer" for hackers, but that's just about it.

There are two reasons why WordPress is wildly successful...

(1) It's built in PHP so it can run on anything. Any webhost out there will run it, and 99% of them will have a "one-click-install" button for you.

(2) It has a pretty damn good admin interface and theme/plugin community. Anyone can install themes and plugins, either thru the interface or with some simple FTP knowledge.

All of this aside... I can't effing stand WordPress. I've been developing for it since it first branched off from the b2 blogging engine many moons ago. For a developer, building a complete site in WP generally consists of hacking plugins to work with one another, or writing your own modifications.

I built this site (http://arbesko.com) in WordPress because the client wanted it. Only about 10% of it is WP. I extended the URL rewriting system and wrote all of my own template code, most of the queries were written by hand. An experience WP dev might frown upon this because of "future incompatibility" but honestly, if you want to write good shit you're not gonna find it with WP's built in tools. The only thing left that isn't my own is pretty much the DB.

For a super simple blog, go with WP. For a "WP as a CMS site", don't fall for that bullshit. Write it in something else, anything else. Write it from scratch in Perl for all I care, just stay away from using WP for anything more than a blog and/or very simple site.

And again, these kinds of things (toto, jekyll, etc...) are fun for hackers, but they will never kill WP. If you want to kill WP you're going to need to attack it from the perspective of an "SEO Marketing social media expert from Tampa FL who has 2 kids and runs the Tampa Tweetup every weekend", and not that of a hacker. The most you can expect from someone is installing an FTP client and uploading it. These people don't play with terminals or git.

I can feel your pain. I've recently begun doing projects with wordpress which require several custom queries and own code. I'm pretty sure there's a better platform for those "advanced cms needs", but, hell, wordpress is still just so convenient.

Also, the "future incompatibility" is not that bad with wordpress, just look out for "deprecated" in the source.

Tiny Wordpress Killer? That's the worst misleading title I've read in a while (and you'll se a lot of that here at HN). WordPress is a blogging software slowly becoming a full-blown CMS which is easy to host and --arguably-- easy to use.

Toto is a nice simple script that publishes static files to heroku via git. It's interesting, and hackish, and fun, but hardly a WP killer.

I don't see how your description of WordPress makes it different from Toto.

Toto is blogging software, has a full blown CMS, through git, is easy to host (Heroku), and is easy to use.

Hence, they serve the same purpose, which is of publishing and managing articles in the cloud.

I would argue that it's easy to use for a hacker. For the majority of bloggers, using git and Heroku is probably not a simple or easy task.

How do I use it without installing a bunch of stuff on my Windows computer?

Wordpress is for the masses this is like jekyll alternative rather than wordpress killer.

Yes but how do you use WordPress without installing a bunch of stuff on your computer? You need MySQL and you need a web server to run it, probably Apache. These don't come standard with Windows, so it's not that much easier to get WordPress running locally. It's true that many hosts now offer very easy WordPress installs, but there is no reason why something like this can't be set up for Toto. But as it is right now, Toto is a great WP replacement for hackers.

I think you missed both points. Point 1 was that he doesn't need to install anything on his Windows client to publish to his blog. Point 2 was that Toto is not a WP killer. By naming Toto as a replacement for hackers (solutions for hackers are never killers of solutions for the masses), you are confirming his point.

Unless you're building a site for a client, a user isn't going to install it locally. They're going to pick up some piece of crap commodity webhosting account on Godaddy or Dreamhost, and use the one-click-install.

A WordPress killer has to be useful for the average joe, the soccer mom, the "social media expert". You're not going to take it down with git and gems. This works for a hacker, but that's it.

Both a Blackberry and the command line can be used to read your email. Some people may prefer the command line for a variety of valid reasons, but that doesn't make it a BB killer.

FWIW - I just migrated my old WordPress site to Heroku, but I decided to keep the WP database structure intact.

So, I made a little Sinatra app with an ActiveRecord adapter that can understand the WP db schema.

It's just a hack to support my immediate needs at this point, but I think the concept is a good one.

http://github.com/trevorturk/trevorturk

Holler if it looks interesting to you.

I've been looking for a lightweight alternative to wordpress, so I'll give this a runaround. My only barrier to entry is having to dump all of wordpress posts into whichever new CMS I choose.

It would be pretty easy to dump each post into its own txt file to work with this. You might have a problem importing comments, I am not sure if disqus has a way to import older comments. I would guess not.

"I am not sure if disqus has a way to import older comments. I would guess not."

This was a long-standing request (http://disqus.disqus.com/how_do_i_import_comments) but it seems there is a solution for the past year (http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/give-your-wordpress-comments-a-...) Tell us if you try it out.

If it doesn't run WP plugins and themes, or at least easily convert the themes, it's not a WP killer.

If you're interested in an ultra-lightweight blogging platform, may I suggest that you check out Bloxsom (http://www.bloxsom.com, pronounced "Blossom")? It's written in Perl, all blog entries are text files, and categorization is done by sorting the entries into different folders.

Admittedly, it doesn't run on RoR, so you can't just pop it up on Heroku, but Bloxsom has been around for years and years, and has a stable group of maintainers on Sourceforge.

I think you meant Blosxom: http://www.blosxom.com/

Your link goes to someone's personal homepage. :)

Oops, you are so right.

Thanks.

On my blog (http://neosmart.net/blog/) I'm running our own "PerformancePress."

It's a WordPress install with a custom frontend. So you get a mind-blowing admin interface, and light-speed frontend. Updates to the frontend are a PITA when it comes to syncing new features with the backend, but for the basics (posts, comments, pingbacks, and.... that's it! It's a BLOG!!) it does the job.

I get this "PerformancePress" is proprietary software?

Good for you to have it.

Yeah, we wrote it in-house. I was speaking with the WordPress team about merging the changes back or something and sponsored a GSoC project for PerformancePress, but they ended up going somewhere else with the GSoC project that I mentored which ultimately failed.

Boy, Toto's almost exactly like something I dreamed up a couple of months ago. Except my idea was more to show how one could use version-controlled text files as your database in many simple situations. There are so many tools available already for doing stuff with text files. All you need is an index by "column" facility, and you're most of the way there (for simple websites like blogs).

For the meta description tag all you need to write is:

Definitely a wordpress killer from an ease of use perspective, or not...

Similar project for Python (that I believe predates Toto, could be wrong): http://www.blogofile.com/

Yeah! Another [x] killer!

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