Wordpress 4.0 | Hacker News Reader

Wordpress 4.0

codex.wordpress.org

66 pointsfranze41 comments

The commenters here bitching about how crap Wordpress is (dev-wise) could only dream about having a product even a hundredth as popular Wordpress.

I know this is a kind of shitty riposte but if you don't like the code-base or some feature it is open-source you know. (I say this in the full knowledge that I hate this come-back but for a project of Wordpress's popularity I think that it's valid enough.)

I have to deal with a lot of non-techies who want to get stuff online and nearly all of them gravitate towards Wordpress. It's a dead simple model, the admin UI is uncomplicated and it's pretty ubiquitous. How it got to be ubiquitous is another question, of course.

Full disclosure: I use it myself even though I could conceivably hand-roll my own blog if I absolutely had to, but why should I when it does what I need which is post a missive or two that know one will ever read.

Congrats on the Four Oh I say, long live our PHP blogging engine overlords.

The bitching is because I have to support their crap. Along with the wordpress security hole of the day lottery, I have to deal with php (and it's cruft and security holes), plus wordpress constantly spamming you with "new version" with zero indication of whether it's just another code dump likely to break plugins or if it fixes zero days, yet still likely to break plugins.

Happiness skyrocketed with octopress.

edit: competent devs would issue long term releases with only security fixes backported. As it is, getting a set of plugins plus a theme working is fine, but it then requires ongoing maintenance because wordpress constantly internally churns and breakage regularly occurs, partly due to their apparently ill-specced internal api. I presume they don't do this either because of lack of engineering ability or because they want to drive people to their hosted product. Either way, it's not a good product.

You can legitimately argue about the legacy code base, but the bit about regular breakage is total bullshit.

Nope, it's my experience (and a brief google will tell you the same). Feel free to clamp your hands over your eyes and sing la-la-la to suit yourself, though.

ps -- if you google why wordpress doesn't issue stable releases, it's because it's too hard. Which rather demonstrates the quality of people working on wordpress, I think, given real developers manage to do it for whole OSes, which are a tad more complicated than a cms [1]

[1] http://wordpress.org/support/topic/long-term-support

So then Chrome is a stupid hacky browser because it doesn't ship a long-term-support version, and just expects everyone to update?

> I know this is a kind of shitty riposte but if you don't like the code-base or some feature it is open-source you know

I'm aware. Which is why we've developed many in-house and open-source plugins, and the like. But, fixing Wordpress' API and developer interface is impossible.

To do so, would require breaking backwards compatibility (or building a compatibility layer, that still won't be 100% due to how many plugins do nasty nasty stuff and rely on implicit behaviour) with the ecosystem of plugins; which are the entire point of Wordpress.

So, we've been building a way to wrap Wordpress' back-end in Laravel. To have proper Composer and Packagist and PSR support, to be able to follow proper development practices, hell, to be able to unit test our code properly: these are things that Wordpress makes far more painful in 2014 than they should be.

PHP may have a reputation for being a nasty hacky language, and Wordpress may have contributed a lot to that reputation, but in this day and age we can do better.

Most devs fail to understand how important user-centricity in softwares are. Look at PHP, Windows, WordPress, or even Photoshop. They don't have the most beautiful code bases, yet look how successful they are. Clearly there is something to it.

Laravel is beautiful but its new and it still needs to prove itself. I've yet to see a project written in laravel (or any of those "modern" frameworks) that would stand the test of time. WordPress code base is a result of its long history (11 years). Backwards compat is no easy task. For that alone I applaud the WordPress team and congrats on the 4 point oh!

For those looking for a Wordpress alternative. I recently launched http://www.webhook.com . It acts like a static site generator like Jekyll and deploys static websites, but it allows for a pretty CMS on the backend that your clients can still edit. There's a UI focused form-builder that removes the normal model layer.

We've been open sourcing the entire thing under an MIT license. The server layer is the last bit and will be available next week.

Specifically anyone coming from a Django / Twig background will probably love our template layer.

How do you handle search? I think that's one of my gripe with static websites.

In the CMS itself it's handled by Elastic Search pretty easily. For the frontend, I used Swiftype's free version. It's what powers Webhook.com (itself is just Elastic Search as well, but adds some niceties like analytic).

I wrote up a tutorial here if you're interested in search on static sites.

http://www.webhook.com/blog/tutorial-add-search-to-your-stat...

this is great, had a look at webhook recently and it looked pretty sweet. How much effort would be required to have it completely self-hosted, without Firebase?

Without Firebase? Quite a bit.

I can't say enough good things about them. And remember, the output is all static, so it's not like you'll be hitting expensive limits from Firebase. We only use them on the CMS site. So unless you plan on having 100 people in your CMS at once you'd be fine with their free plan.

The self-host docs come out next week. It's working, we're just testing and documenting everything as best we can.

As someone who uses Wordpress daily at my job... Gosh I wish it would die already. Any sort of development is so damned painful. Things like VersionPress and Thermal API are making it less crap, but it's still so bad that we've been working on a way to inject Wordpress into Laravel (with a neat storage driver that will keep your mapped models in Wordpress' backend). It's made our latest project far simpler and more powerful.

I would love a version of WP hybridized with Laravel. I briefly attempted it with CodeIgniter, but it proved non-trivial and I didn't have the time to see it through.

For all of WP's countless problems and general ickiness, it delivers what it strives for extremely well. The real strength is the ecosystem of plugins and themes, and the balance it strikes in being dev-capable while exposing a lot of "prosumer" functionality to end users who are computer-savvy, but not developers. (Of course, the plugins are a two-edged sword, given how many of them carry security vulnerabilities.)

Thanks for the hat-tip of VersionPress and Thermal. I like the idea of using WP only for its admin, and I've done it a couple times before, albeit using custom queries to fetch data manually.

> but it proved non-trivial and I didn't have the time to see it through.

It is rather non-trivial, and we're not sure how far we'll be able to take it, but I'm very happy that my work is happy to finance this sort of hacking. We've got a "LaravelInjector" plugin for Wordpress, that allows you to have Laravel and Wordpress answering to the same url (a Laravel route is tried first, then Wordpress' "routing" system kicks in). We'll be open sourcing both of these systems in the very near future[0]. I hang around #wordpress on Freenode, so you'll see me in there if you're interested in chatting about it :)

[0] https://github.com/JuniorCru

Thanks, I'll keep an eye peeled. :)

I too use WordPress for work daily, I have a lot of hope for the JSON API from Ryan McCue that would allow us to use a frontend framework like Angular. The only benefit it would have over Thermal is it is supposed to get baked into core someday.

Either way, my disdain for WordPress grows slightly everyday.

I've used it as a backend for an android app recently.

Not too bad. The JSON is kind of messy though

> Wordpress into Laravel

That's a little scary. Any reason you aren't put focus on Drupal 8?

> That's a little scary.

It is.

> Any reason you aren't put focus on Drupal 8?

Clients in Australia love WordPress, and love the backend. It's a shame, to be honest, as I personally am loving what Drupal are doing[0] lately. In the future I hope to move that direction, as I'm a big fan of the Symfony components, but honestly I'm more looking forward to PageKit[1].

[0] http://jgirvin.com/2013/10/14/drupals-casual-audience/

[1] http://www.pagekit.com/

As one of the developers of Thermal API, thank you for allowing us to make your WordPress dev experience a little less crappy ;)

Looks quite nice. There's a video showing the new stuff at http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/09/04/wordpress-4-0-arrives-em...

Dumb question: Why is this considered a major new version? I don't see any significant overhauls on the frontend, just some improvements to existing UIs. Is there a major backend refactor that goes along with this?

WordPress doesn't do minor and major versions; they just add 0.1 to the last release. In general it has worked very well for them and the WordPress community.

Read the TNW link above.

Anyone unhappy with wordpress should really look at Craft (http://buildwithcraft.com) we have been using it almost exclusively for the past year and haven't looked back.

Amazing at all the things wordpress isnt.

Need a blog? Pelican

What does wordpress have that something like Ghost doesn't? Working with wordpress is a real pain, it's code is not what I would want to dig into a friday afternoon. Why is wordpress still popular?

Simple UI.

Assloads of plugins.

History.

Lowest-common-denominator hosting requirements.

I mean, I've been using WP to run my site since before Ghost was even an idea. I've got a blog, a couple of image galleries, and a couple of graphic novels. I'm using styles I designed myself for all of these, plus about a dozen plugins.

I didn't have to dig into its guts to make this stuff work. I didn't have to type a single terminal command to make it happen. I just had to upload some files via FTP, then leverage HTML/CSS and some basic PHP knowledge. And now I just type stuff into a web form, or fire up a client app on my computer (or my phone/tablet), and post whatever the hell I want to with very little friction. Those posts get mirrored to Facebook, Livejournal, Twitter, and Tumblr automatically. Comic pages get automagically collected into [chapters](http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/chapter/01/). Images get optimized, then mirrored to Wordpress' CDN. Spam comments get caught.

I'm looking at [Ghost's download page](https://ghost.org/download/) and what do I see? It requires Node. How many web hosts have Node preinstalled? Do I really have time in my busy schedule of drawing comics to install Node, get it running, and keep it up to date? My host keeps PHP up to date for me and I can get on with making the content, rather than fiddling with the blog.

I wouldn't want to dig deep into WP. Version 1 is ten years old. There's probably some horrible code from 1.0 still lying around that codebase - hell, there's probably some code left over from 2001's B2, which WP forked off of. But I don't want to dig into its code anyway. I just want to have a website that I don't have to edit by hand.

From the perspective of someone using WP to manage their content, rather than as a project in and of itself, working with it is pretty easy.

There are an awful lot of themes and plugins? I was at a talk the other day where some guys had built quite a good support social network for MS sufferers using Wordpress and Buddypress (shift.ms) in spite of not being programmers. I dunno if there's another platform where they could have done as well?

An ecosystem and the fact that it powers 18% of the web.

23% at this point.

stuff I’ve done with Wordpress lately…

- made a paid membership system for a major trade organization, including renewable credit card payments and integration with a third-party CRM

- built an event tracking calendar, including import from Eventbrite

- a password-protected “garden” for designers to exchange wireframes and portfolio pieces with clients

It all works extremely well. Wordpress is open, well-supported and well-documented. I don't like the templating language (at all), but otherwise Wordpress works extremely well and is somehow improving with age.

The vast, vast majority of people who work with wordpress never have to see the code, beyond some settings in a config file. You have to not think about it as a developer and think about it as a consumer who just wants "a site" with themes and plugins that "just work" (and with wordpress, they mostly do.)

Although as a developer, I agree - the code is pretty awful, even for PHP. But... small business owners, bloggers and such couldn't care less about that.

As a pragmatic developer, I love WordPress. it's the most productive programming platform I've found, and with PhpStorm to develop with it, I'm come to find it rather elegant, albeit not what most PHP non-WP programmers want or expect.

Why do I like it? It's the most productive PHP development platform that exists, hands down. With it I only have to code the unique functionality I need and not everything else.

P.S. Before anyone preaches OOP at me, realize I started teaching OOP back in 1989, and n 1991 I even wrote a book that had several chapters covering OOP.

Feature-wise It has everything that Ghost have and more, lots more. That's the whole point with Ghost, that it only does a small, simple subset of what WP does.

Plugins, plugins, plugins.

And client familiarity, which can't be discounted (and is a two-edge sword in and of itself). I'm no fan of Wordpress and would rather use something else, but at this point there are few systems that can truly challenge it. I hope that changes soon, however.

At the very least it should tell you that the success of a product does not necessarily depend on your experience with the products code-base.

I wonder, is there a good open source Go-based blogging platform out there, too?

I refuse to take any new upgrade seriously until they fix the galleries. The whole galleries concept is broken, and though every time they build new eye candy upon that same unbearably broken concept. Dammit.

So convoluted, needlessly complex and filled with legacy code that it makes the most useful slow program for php acceleration benchmarks.

Sure, why not load 1000 files to process even the smallest request that might even just be a redirect after the first few lines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com