photomatt

Some really excellent comments in this discussion. While there is some predictable reactions (my way is right! your way is wrong!) I'm impressed by the number of people who've taken a more nuanced view of how and why platforms get adopted by developers and regular folks.

One thing I'd encourage people to think about in terms of how we take WordPress to the next level isn't just that we have a ton of plugins and themes that people love, but how we got them in the first place. That network effect wasn't always there, it developed over time, and was caused by something.

You're right: I removed his last name and full number.

Enterprise runs on WP.com infrastructure (multi-datacenter, tens of thousands of CPU cores, terabytes of memory) so it's able to absorb traffic levels above what most cloud hosts can. The trade-off is you have less flexibility to modify stack than you would with a VPS or cloud hosting account.

That's sort of like saying Facebook scaling is a "non-issue" because it's just a bunch of small, independent profile pages. Of course some elements can and should be sharded, but that doesn't mean that scaling is trivial, especially as you get into more advanced and social features and a rapidly increasing percentage of traffic is logged in and fully dynamic.

I think we agree that "scaling" small (sub-RAM-size) amounts of data to a largely logged-out and cached audience is easy, but I think you think of WordPress.com as much smaller and more static than it actually is. My apologies if I'm misunderstanding your point of view.

If you want to see standalone sites in the top 100 running WP besides wordpress.com, check out time.com, umbrellanews.com, celebuzz.com, and large sections of nytimes.com, cnn.com, and people.com. If you were to spider the top million Alexa domains, you'd find about 17% of them on WP:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_man...

There isn't anything in our feature roadmap or our growth plans that is hindered by MySQL. At some point I could imagine recommending a drop-in replacement like MariaDB.

Fair question: WordPress.com. This list from Quantcast has WP.com at #16

https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites/US/1

But that only includes *.wordpress.com subdomains, and our highest traffic blogs almost always invest the money to have their own domain. We have a tag[0] to track those in Quantcast, and it's currently at 129.7M people in the US, which would place it between Facebook (143M) and MSN (98M). (Blogger might have a similar boost into the top 10, but I don't see any others in the top 50 that could have so many mapped domains.)

Of course we cache, with a publicly available WP plugin called Batcache.[1]

[0] http://cl.ly/image/081G1r2f0Z18 [1] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/batcache/

I forgot to mention our biggest architectural change, which is already ongoing: an ever-increasing percentage of our codebase is shifting to Javascript instead of PHP. At some point I expect it to be the vast majority.

Running WP.com, I'm very sensitive too the performance implications of our stack. A small percentage change in performance could mean the difference of racks of servers for us. At Automattic we've also had a peek behind the curtain of pretty much every high-scale WP installation out there.

The vast majority of performance issues I've seen are not from something intrinsic to PHP or MySQL, but how people configure them. (MySQL is especially confounding.) There have been ports to other DBs but nothing that matches the performance of regular WP with a single layer of caching, like Batcache or Supercache.

For dynamic pageviews, ck2 is correct, our biggest barrier is just the amount of code we're parsing and executing on every pageload, which a different DB backend would not change. This problem is bigger on WP.com. I think we can fix this by becoming more conservative and clever about what we load for a given page and it's something I expect to be addressed bit by bit over the next few releases. (BTW ck2 if you want to work on that, please ping me!)

It's old but it still works fine, check out the Art Direction plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/art-direction/

No reason to be sad -- imagine a platform that you can stay on whether you're posting pictures of your food to a few dozen people (as I do) or the NYT FiveThirtyEight blog covering the election, to all of Wired.com. That's democratizing publishing.

> Is it safe to say that without a vastly improved mobile experience WordPress is in serious trouble?

I would 100% agree with that.

Because it's easy to develop for, can scale to be one of the top ten sites on the internet, and your users won't need training to use it.

Now I'll be the first to tell people there are certain things that you should build from scratch, but the examples of what people build with WordPress can be pretty breathtaking even to me:

http://wordpress.org/showcase/

I really like some of the things John has done in his mockups here, especially on the write screen, and contrary to what he thinks ideas like this are more than welcome in the WordPress community. (For example check out the dramatically revamped media or the dozens of eliminated options in trunk right now.)

The one big mistake in his premise, however, is that only 34% of WordPress users are blogging, the actual percentage is much higher. The survey he quotes me talking about was of mostly people who make their living building WordPress sites (over 20,000) and mostly WordPress.org users. This community naturally focuses (and contributes) more on the CMS and application framework side of WordPress.

On WordPress.com, however, the vast majority of its millions of users blog, and are blogging more every day. If you visit WP.com you will see a simplified and streamlined user experience that is boldly different from the traditional wp-admin dashboard. Already we've seen huge boosts in user engagement from this new experience, and while it's a few dozen iterations from being ready I'm confident the best concepts will make their way back into WordPress core when they are ready.

But overall, I love seeing different people's takes on what the next generation of WordPress will look like, and I wish more people did blog posts like this. We've had 3 dramatic shifts in our evolution before, and the shape the next one will take is a topic that occupies most of my waking hours, mind space, and creativity. And don't even get me started on mobile... :)

The gallery shortcode supports this, just add these attributes wherever you use [gallery]: columns="1" size="full". That tells it to make it one-column instead of the default three, and for the images to be the width of the post. (They'll resize automatically if you switch themes.) Hope that helps!

That seems like a really terrible violation of Posterous' brand and trademarks. There is also a lot more to keeping a blogging service running for posterity than just charging. It is a huge responsibility for people to entrust you with their content, one not to be taken lightly.

FWIW, 92% of WordPress users we surveyed are using it as a CMS. People seem to like to say "it's just blogging software" to put us in a box, but people are using it for so much more, and most much happier than the OP.

Yay! :)

Co-founder of WordPress here -- since no one has mentioned it yet: I would highly recommend VaultPress, it's designed exactly to protect against this sort of thing.

The most elegant proponent of this idea is Douglas Rushkoff, his latest book being "Program or Be Programmed."

My QNAP is super-quiet.

We're trying to remove all the barriers you used to have to hosting WP yourself, from ease of upgrading to the cool social features on WP.com that are in or coming to Jetpack.

I don't want to host every WordPress blog in the world -- too much trouble. :) Also not how the internet should work. This gives you the best of decentralized and centralized. Many of the third-party hosts are doing crazy-nice stuff already with scaling and failover, they just don't market it in a Heroku-manner because their standard pricing works so well. (The launch partners for Jetpack have close to 2B in revenue collectively.)

I don't know if people will fully understand Jetpack yet, because it's early -- like the iPhone 1G. But this is the most significant release Automattic has done yet, in my opinion.

They're on VIP hosting -- http://vip.wordpress.com/hosting/

If you're a publisher it's a great deal, we can absorb huge spikes in traffic because the scale of what we do. But you have the risk of being collateral damage in something that affects all of WP.com, like a DDoS or bad code deploy.

On the bright side, anything that impacts all of WP.com is an all-hands-on-deck matter for us since it's the vast majority of our business, so we're as aligned as could be.

Everything is mostly back to normal.

And just updated the post to change the codename to "Reinhardt," just as a sign of good faith and before anyone else gets the wrong idea.

Hey guys -- for the past 7 years we've named every release after a jazz musician, as you can see here:

http://wordpress.org/about/roadmap/

Usually no one notices, and the codename isn't even in the tweets or announcement email, just a sentence that clearly links to the jazz musician's Wikipedia page. (It's not like Ubuntu codenames that are widely used.) We also put a fun plug for djangoproject.org to the end of the "future" section, which hopefully will also introduce some new people to their project. I haven't seen anyone tweeting the codename except to complain, so I don't think this is going to confuse anybody think we're rewriting in Python. (However much they may want that.)

That said, apologies for the unintended controversy. In hindsight, we probably should have used "Reinhardt" to have the same effect of honoring one of our favorite musicians without anyone getting confused with a fellow Open Source project.

Now to work on 3.2 Sinatra! (Kidding, Ruby folks.)

Check out VimPress: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1953

The WordPress team has thought a lot about this issue, and the most effective solution so far has been to have robust official sources of themes and plugins and educating people to get everything from WordPress.org. (It's the only source built-in to WP software.) It's our equivalent of airplane security's "tougher cabin doors and passenger's willingness to fight back."

An automated scanner in core might temporarily relieve some of the current techniques of spammers but it would be trivial to vary obfuscation to evade any automated check, and I worry more about the false sense of security they would provide. A built-in automated checker would not make it safe for you to Google around random sites and install their software to execute on your server.

On the plus side, we now have over 1,300 themes in our official repository and every single one of them has been verified by hand.

Security is a major issue and it is a top priority for us.