Dear WordPress
ma.tt
ma.tt
Having said that, it is an excellent blogging platform and CMS, but this is something that is usually forgotten, resulting in it finding itself shoehorned into the most inappropriate places.
Simpler, more specialised blogging engines are so beautifully designed, I don't see myself ever wanting to work with Wordpress again.
This reminds me of Joel Spolsky's "Bloatware and the 80/20 myth": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html , in which he says:
A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release "lite" word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy.
When you start marketing your "lite" product, and you tell people, "hey, it's lite, only 1MB," they tend to be very happy, then they ask you if it has their crucial feature, and it doesn't, so they don't buy your product.
Wordpress seems to have everyone's critical feature, or critical plug-in, or a developer intimately familiar with the platform who can be hired to write your critical plug-in. By the time "more specialised blogging engines" have the flexibility and pervasiveness of Wordpress, I bet they'll resemble. . . Wordpress.
Are we still talking about actual code here? Because if so, I'll take that bet.
Anybody who's used a word processor can pick up most of what they need to know to work as an author or editor in WordPress in a afternoon. I'm not about to recreate all the widely available documentation and tutorials WordPress has available - or explain to my clients "all you need to do is write all your website content in MarkDown, then run this Ruby script from the command line to publish it to S3/CloudFront!"
There are plenty of better publishing solutions in terms of codebase, and there are plenty of solutions that offer equal or better user interfaces, but none that bring the ability to choose from hundreds of thousands of themes to style a website, which is the main focus of your average blog publisher.
In terms of keeping the thing running, it has not been a pleasant experience.
I agree
>and doesn't scale well.
Wordpress scales fine, but it dosent do it magically its self out of the box (but what hobbyist web project written 10 years ago did?)
Smashing magazine talked to some of the bigger wp installs to see how they did it (Hot air is doing 45mil /page view a month) http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2012/09/12/secrets-high-traff...
I have scaled Wordpress to multiple front end servers with not to much work (because Wordpress is stateless and doesn't have sessions you dont even have to worry bout sharing sessions).
The only thing you need to worry about is having a shared storage for the uploads. You can do this through a NAS or I just upload to s3 then use a CDN.
If you get to the size that you need to have multiple databases (which you shouldn't if your using a page cache plugin like the official Batcache plugin) wordpress offers HyperDB as a solution.
I am actually going to be working on a Wordpress-a-a-Service type hosting solution where speed and scalability will never be a problem for the customer.
Where Wordpress does not scale is the default install on shared hosting or a VPS with little resources.
Finally I just wanted to thank Matt and the whole team at automatic for all their hard work into a maybe in-prefect but much used work-horse of the internet.
10 years, still no file cache shipping with the mainline. That solves 90% of the problem for 90% of sites.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Object_Cache#P...
On the other hand, as of my understanding Drupal does page caching to DB by default (straight out of the box?) and seems super quick.
When they added autoupdate, that had large host environment implications. Import/export has host environment implications. It goes on and on.
There's no technical reason they can't have a simple page cache in mainline that turns itself off when there's no write access.
True for shared environment but WP does fine even on a low-end vps. 2-3 years ago I helped someone setup wp on a lowend vps server which successfully handled ~5million pageviews under 24 hours, the vps had a measly 1gb memory and the memory usage never went over 700mb. nginx/php-fpm/varnish/apc/w3t done. Took me less than 1 hour to set it up.
I don't understand when people complain about wordpress being bloat but at the same time wants it to solve all kinds of problem right out of the box.
Yeap, you got it. Php-fpm and apc goes a long way ;)
They're always in my "secret weapons" arsenal when I need to checklist a slow PHP/Drupal installation, especially when they're hosted on VPC or AWS.
This doesn't really work on a more "modern" style of site, where the content is more dynamic and changeable.
Again, a lot of these issues only really arise when your product moves past being a blogging-style platform (such as happened to us), but this is something that either WP, or the WP community, seems to be striving for more and more.
Agreed. But it's also considerably less of a nightmare than it was five years back. Which gives me some kind of hope for the product ;-)
HN or hacker community is a very small community and its hardly the microcosm of the internet.
Not really -- they just like to believe it works that way. What the more people chose is based on more pragmatic issues and market factors that "what the geeks use".
And no, "we advice the rest of the family / friends what to buy" doesn't cut it either. We may do it, for OUR friends/family, but in total we are very few, and our friends/families aggregated are insignificant statistical noise to the general population. And nobody mimicks them either.
The "hacker community" doesn't even influence the general programming community (which is like 1000 times bigger). For example, most people use Java or .NET and not Haskell or Smalltalk or LISP etc -- heck, in the ranks of the millions of the general programming community, not even that many use Python. And that's why even in programming circles Wordpress wins 2 or 3 orders of magnitude to all things like Octopress aggregated
What does happen is that sometimes the Hacker community embraces a new technology first. But getting there first is not like "guiding others".
In the same sense that a tiny minority of underground music fans might have liked some obscure band 5 years before it become mainstream. That doesn't mean that they are the factor the band "made it big". If that was it, then the dozens of other obscure bands they like would have "made it big" or close to big, too.
Bloggers left in droves to the only other platform anywhere close to capable enough to handle their needs.
Now a whole lot of people who made money from blogging and therefore had money to spend created a market for developers to learn how to use WP.
The premium themes market, as controversial as it was when it first emerged, further drove investment of time in learning the system and building plugins.
Then, because people wanted to maximise their financial return from their initial investment, WP began to be used for all sorts of shit like as a CMS and eCommerce platform, for membership sites, you name it.
The cycle now feeds into itself: there is a huge market which attracts developers who in turn make WP a safe choice for webmasters who know they need a well supported platform, in turn contributing to increase in market size.
The most interesting thing about it all is that, despite it being such a monstrosity in it's implementation, from a user perspective it's a pretty good system - proof that with enough time and manpower one can, indeed, polish a turd.
I think Wordpress's greatest strengths are its ability to handle many users updating the site, personalization through a plethora of freely available themes, and its ability to handle and display many different kinds of content. All of these features are readily available without having to delve into a single line of code.
It's so funny how outraged hacker news becomes when a startups design is stolen but when dcurtis made svbtle a private platform they were all to happy to have people steal the design.
I mean, to me it looks pretentious and lame and I'd never use it, but it seems like it'd be legally actionable if there was actual copyright violations in the offing.
(Note: this vague recollection might not have been about the particular WordPress theme in the parent comment, but I do recall looking at one of the early Svbtle WP clones and seeing this)
(I still recommend Tumblr over WordPress if you aren't blogging professionally, though)
I regret that this is bubble talk. If you think non-software types are going to publish blog posts at a command line, I don't know what else to say.
What's all that about, I wonder?
Matt acknowledged the issue with this content (cloaked with CSS) and apologized the next month: http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/
I've seen even Magento forum members (Magento being a complex e-commerce solution written on the Zend framework) saying they do not know how to write more than a couple of lines of PHP.
But yeah, the fact that WordPress hosting plays so badly with git is a big part of the reason why I probably won't be using it again.
You're assuming you're dealing with someone at least a bit technical. To them, FTP is drag and drop, git is either 'hacking' or magic.
There's no reason we can't make a Git client that's as simple to use as FTP, and obscures advanced functionality completely unless a user asks for it. Github's desktop clients still aren't quite this.
I'm sure someone would ask why use Git at all then if you're not going to be branching/merging all the time- but at least then when I (more advanced person) need to come in and fix someone's site, I've got a good place to work from, even if they've always just committed linearly to a single branch.
Git: Hi! Let me teach you about version control! We'll start with the command line version. Also you may have to ask your host to turn on Git access to your files. And the likelyhood of them making it easy for you to just drop one file into a simple graphical Git client is close to zero.
Who in your life is clueless about computers? Imagine you're them.
Which one looks more appealing? Which one looks scary and intimidating and demands that you learn a thousand new things on top of learning all the stuff you'll have to learn to get a website up?
> They say git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.
If my goal is the functionality of ftp, I prefer ftp in every way except the security issue. (Which is why I use scp instead.)
The point being, sadly, I think that we're a ways off before the average non-technical person is comfortable using git.
After being with Wordpress for more than 4 years now, I am now frustrated and recommend my clients anything but Wordpress.
It was cool and helpful, but over the years, it's codebase quality has drastically reduced. If you ran CMS'es based off wordpress, I have nothing but sorry feelings for you; simply because I ran one too.
Now, my new favorite isn't blogger or tumblr, but rather:
rails generate scaffold Post title:string content:textFor small groups/projects like student organizations and blogs with multiple editors, Wordpress can be a godsend. I was part of a student organization that needed an informational website with a blog component so I quickly set up a Wordpress site that 5-10 people used to populate the site with content.
As an aside, the individual who took over my role as web admin has since moved the site to Dreamweaver :( The older members of the org are frustrated that they can't individually add content to the site anymore and the org is transitioning the site back to Wordpress in the fall.
I know static page generators are more cool and nerdy but there is a wordpress plugin called really static[0]. This plugin can generate static html files from your site. It can save html pages on some folder or upload via ftp.You can install wordpress on your laptop or some password protected sub-domain, buy some nice looking theme, start publishing and enjoy having best of the both worlds...
Could you please use any font other than Source Sans Pro[1]? It looks terrible on at least one major desktop operating system.[2]
Here's a screenshot of nightly with a similar issue. http://i.imgur.com/HP02e5b.png
Even this, with the font stripped out looks better http://i.imgur.com/6KB2iuG.png
If you adjust your cleartype settings (or turn it on in XP) it will look a bit more normal.
That's just off the top of my head.
Edit 2: apparently there was an organised campaign which involved contacting a certain Matt Mullenweg to get the second blog in question reinstated. It succeeded. Lovely: http://weirdward.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/email-to-matt-mull...