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Comment by marcc | Hacker News Reader

Seems neat and I'd love to give it a try. I'm not a blog engine expert by any means, but it seems to be the the killer feature missing from this and other "this is not wordpress" blog engines is the ability to accept/read wordpress themes. Almost everything on woothemes and themeforest are available as wordpress themes, so why not? Is there a license issue with this?

Edit: I get the php issue here. It's not really an issue I don't know why everyone jumps to assuming you need. Php interpreter. Anything running node.js can run php. Im just saying that there are a ton of wordpress themes out there and Id be much more willing to try something new if I was able to reuse a theme. At least reuse parts or most of it.

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> It's not really an issue I don't know why everyone jumps to assuming you need. Php interpreter.

Yes, you do need a php interpreter to run wordpress themes as many wordpress php functions need to be customized in order to change the css.

> Anything running node.js can run php.

That doesn't make any sense. Anything that can run node.js can also run erlang, so let's use some erlang code inside node.js, right?

"That doesn't make any sense. Anything that can run node.js can also run erlang, so let's use some erlang code inside node.js, right?"

Sounds right from a Turing perspective, but probably not from a pratical point of view. There are tons of services that provide PHP hosting, but you probably need a root server for Erlang. All services that run Node.js (except Node.Js specific services like Joyent) are probably root serves and so can run PHP.

I'm sure they can run php, but that won't help running wordpress themes coded in php run in a node.js app.

WordPress themes can and do embed arbitrary PHP, so wouldn't you have to basically build in a PHP interpreter in order to read them?

I don't think anyone is going to write a PHP parser for a couple of shitty themes

I updated my comment. I wouldn't approach it from the idea of a php parser. Also, don't assume that its a couple of "shitty themes". I hate to tell you this, but wordpress wouldn't be where it it today without these "shitty themes". Writing a blog engine in node.js is a great start, but to gain traction you need to appeal to the masses.

If you're shelling out to PHP to execute the themes (which is likely to take up the bulk of processing time outside of talking to the database), why write the rest of the CMS in a language other than PHP?

Considering WordPress uses PHP for its templates (like "<?php the_title(); ?>"), it would be more sane to just rewrite the themes to use the templating engine Calipso uses.

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