Why NASA Chose WordPress for Revamping Its Flagship Website
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Really looks like they considered alternatives.
All that said, WordPress is a fine choice for this use case. My joke is only about it taking so long to reach a foregone decision
I wonder how this move affected their cloud spend. WordPress VIP plans start at US$25,000/year:
(I work on a similarly-priced competitor to VIP.)
(I recently spoke to some of the people who worked on these sites; may be misremembering!)
I can't speak about wagtail.io specifically, but a lot of "used by..." sections on websites are based on email signups.
For example, if I run a SaaS and someone @nasa.gov signs up to try it out, I can then list NASA as one of my users, even if they just tested it and never put it into production.
It's not all NASA sites - but used by NASA for some sites.
At my work we used mediawiki heavily but only for intranet.
As someone who ran a digital agency for a while and inherited a lot of WP sites, I will say that there are few things more miserable in the dev world than managing a WP site with lots of custom functionality. It's the worst of all worlds (PHP without structure or version control, Turing-complete plugin architecture that makes security impossible, code running anywhere can monkey-patch any other functionality in the entire site, etc.)
And... the availability of "wordpress developers" hinges on people being able to do the 'fast and loose' thing as needed. I know there are WP devs/agencies that use version control for all their stuff, but it's the opposite of how most people learn and work in wordpress.
Wordpress however is still a hug pile of garbage. It might be functional and has all the features you'd ever need, but I could never trust it to run even a simple blog.
Edit: just looked at the some random Wordpress sources to check if source quality improved. It didn't. Who could ever be productive with something like this?: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/wp-admin/...
The millions of sites running on Wordpress? Wordpress? Facebook?
Maybe Wordpress has outgrown its php legacy, but there are many websites that are far better off writing a bunch of HTML/inline CSS/and a sprinkling of php and JS and getting it out there, as opposed to setting up massive build tool chains and writing React components.
In fact, when that was the norm, line developers were far more productive and building tons of personal and commercial webpages from scratch, building websites, web apps, etc. The developer output and productivity outside of large corporations and organizations seems far lower today than it did a decade+ ago.
Edit: I’m not a PHP developer, but I’m going over that code and it seems eminently readable. Heck, even as a non php developer I can fully understand what it’s trying to do. What exactly is the issue with the code? Is it the fact that the HTML part is written as HTML and not some made up language that tries to look like HTML but then compiles down to JS which then tries to reconstruct the HTML looking like thing back into HTML? Or the fact that i can read much of the code in that single file and don’t have to dig into a build configuration file to figure out where the corresponding JS and CSS files are located?
I’m sure there’s a lot of ways the code can be improved, but this code seems just fine?
Same here. I was kind of shocked on HN how man advocate for it.
I hated PHP back before PHP IDEs were a thing. I think now, PHP has matured in a way that has done itself a lot of favors.
Blind hatred is annoying, yes, but there were good reasons to dislike it back then that probably aren't as applicable today.
The fact that WP is so big doesn't make PHP ecosystem much more attractive. And I used to do WP dev full time.
What are the benefits over an enterprise CMS like Drupal 10?
Am I incorrect?
Even though they may be security ridden, bug ridden, exploitable leading to an increase of DDoS, Crypto mining, and malware spreading and exploitation there is no other CMS out there that has the sheer amount of plugins that WordPress has.
Wordpress as well has a large pool of developers, designers who you can hire commission for cheap to create your brand compared to any other. Better?
Tons of other people use it, which means tons of other people are beta-testing it for you. The WP community runs a competent security program that issues patched regularly.
And tons of people know it inside and out. That makes it easier to hire strong staff, get competitive rates and performance from vendors, and find expert help for hosting, devops, performance tuning, security, etc.
Drupal had all this as well but, sadly, it’s all shrinking. In retrospect D7 was the high point and although they tried to “get off the island” with the massive changes in D8, all they really did was drive away a bunch of believers, while mostly failing to attract new fans.
There’s a level of information architecture complexity where Wordpress starts to suck and Drupal is great. Thanks to changes in WP and Drupal over the past decade, that level has moved way up. Wordpress can do a lot of stuff that D7 could, and D10 can do a lot of even more powerful stuff that few websites actually need.
Proprietary plugins, open source plugins, half broken themes, conflicts, security holes ..
These things seem par for the course?
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Drupal has a huge ecosystem too, and it's truly open source and built on a solid extensible framework (Symfony). D10 is a completely different beast to D7 .. and actual uses good development practices.
Is WordPress closer technically to the bad days of D7?
There’s also varied ecosystems within WordPress, as it’s large enough to support many. For example, the DAM integration cited in the article isn’t something you’ll find on many sites, since it’s an enterprise use case; we don’t even list it on the official plugin directory at all. Plugins and libraries used on enterprise sites are basically a separate ecosystem unto themselves.
(I manage the team that maintains said DAM plugin.)
That’s not really relevant to how enterprises decide on web content management software, though.
This is not true - while there are paid (“premium”) plugins in the WordPress ecosystem, they are all open source, as they are classified as derivative works of WordPress and hence the GPL virally applies.
There are in fact some plugin resellers who sell bundles of premium plugins under the GPL - it’s frowned upon by the community, but it’s certainly legal. (At least for the copyright; trademarks are a separate story.)
Typically, with paid plugins you’re paying for access to the download system (making updates easy), and for support.
See also, https://wordpress.org/news/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too/
The plugins don't always upgrade easily or work well together in the future.
Wordpress is ok for some situations, I'm not against using it. I've seen enough times where it's been used and another solution Django or Drupal may have been a smarter long term option.
Theres a specific versioned API. Less of a wild west by the sound of it.
OTOH their website https://lonerockpoint.com is terribly slow on my (Safari @ M1 Pro)...
It's pretty bad and it really means you have to constantly update them to be reasonably secure. There's a whole service for scanning its vulnerabilities: https://wpscan.com/
Of course every other product has vulnerabilities too but they are not that easily and heavily exploited.
And plugins are unavoidable in the WordPress ecosystem unless you really just need a simple personal blog. Together with the security need to constantly upgrade due to the many vulnerabilities makes it a big headache. You can't afford to leave some updates slide and then you have to deal with all the incompatibilities and issues of plugin updates.