I can appreciate what wordpress has achieved over the years, and what it has helped to create. But the current wordpress code base is a nightmare to work with, and doesn't scale well.
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.
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.
> Where Wordpress does not scale is the default install on shared hosting or a VPS with little resources.
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.
Unfortunately most of the issues come from WordPress being written for a web that existed 10 years ago. Static pages with little dynamic content.
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.
Yes, yes, the famous hosting environment argument. It comes up whenever the WP team just don't want to do work on the actual guts of the system as opposed to tickbox features.
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.
Not to mention that WordPress is now popular enough to bully hosting companies if they wished to do so. What hosting company would want to admit that their services are incompatible with the latest version of WordPress? WordPress is no longer under any realistic obligation to respect the lowest common denominator of hosting environments, because whatever it requires will become the norm. It's a trememdous power that few open-source projects enjoy, and one that could be used for the greater good. If the next version of WordPress just went ahead and required PHP 5.4, for example, the hosting industry would have no choice but to upgrade their PHP versions a.s.a.p.
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.
I'm not fan of the codebase, but until something else comes along that's as easy for my clients to learn/use - I'm going to keep on recommending and installing WordPress for them.
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!"
I imagine the reason most people use WordPress isn't because of the authoring or editing — most of which can be replicated easily using things like TinyMCE — but the ecosystem of themes and plugins. Your technologically-inept client has access to a vast number of free, cheap, and easily installable themes to style their website whatever gaudy way they want.
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.
If other specialized blogging engines had one-tenth the extensibility that WP has, then I could see myself switching. But when you have hundreds of thousands of people willing to write plugins for free or very little money that integrate with the most complex payment systems and third-party APIs, you tend to deal with the crappy core code of the main module.
Interesting. I've seen increasing number of posts on Github Pages[1], Octopress[2], Medium[3], and Svbtle[4]. It seems that (at least in the hacker community) there is an increasing shift to minimalist blogging stacks. I'm excited to see if the rest of the world follows.
Exactly. Personally, I like playing around with static site generators but when somebody asks me how to start a website (or if I'm setting up a website for a non-technical individual) I almost always refer them to Wordpress.
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.
But Hacker Community is the one that guides others towards new technologies. 10 years from now, Octopress may be prime blogging platform or second best!
>But Hacker Community is the one that guides others towards new technologies. 10 years from now, Octopress may be prime blogging platform or second best!
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.
More like the blogging community. The reason WP is so popular now is because MovableType stopped being free like 7 or 8 years ago.
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.
WordPress is what's being pushed for 100% control by personal bloggers and businesses. Unfortunately, there are no good alternatives, especially for those who aren't tech-savvy.
(I still recommend Tumblr over WordPress if you aren't blogging professionally, though)
I don't like the Svbtle style but I don't think you should suggest using something that stole the design and is not condoned by the original author.
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've never followed this brouhaha--was it stolen (i.e., was code lifted from svbtle) or is it a reimplementation?
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.
From vague recollection - there was some pretty damning evidence when it launched that entire swathes of css were direct copies - not just functional equivalence, but identical class/id/selector names.
(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 stretched myself too thin trying to get you there, and I did a stupid thing to pay for it. I hurt you, but instead of casting me away you held me closer, supported me, gave me another chance. I will never forget that.
Andy Baio posted in March 2005 about this: "Wordpress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he's been quietly hosting at least 168,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages."
source: http://waxy.org/2005/03/wordpress_websi/
Matt acknowledged the issue with this content (cloaked with CSS) and apologized the next month:
http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/
I had the privilege of meeting the (significantly) lesser known co-founder of Wordpress Mike Little[1] a week or so ago and this seems an appropriate time to mention what really genuine and nice guy he seemed to be. Clearly he hasn't quite received the same notoriety as Matt and it really seemed funny to introduce him as the "Co-founder of Wordpress" yet very few people actually knew of him :)
Dear Wordpress- meet MVC, git, postgres, sane security and 100% testing. Please leave your old friend FTP- he was never all that safe or great to begin with.
The thing is, Wordpress is used by people who don't know and do not want to know what those things are.
I dare say, even PHP is mostly used by people who don't know what most of what you wrote is.
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.
FTP: lots of graphical clients available for all OSs, your host can probably give you a bookmark to drop into one for a Windows client and a Mac client, and if they don't it's pretty easy to make a new bookmark pointing to your server with your login/password. You're done, start uploading stuff!
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?
I think for basic functionality, we still have a long way to go with Git clients.
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.
To be fair, Git is probably arcane to quite a few 'technical' people as well, and a lot of the people who do use Git probably fall into the set including myself who would be lost beyond the basic 'init, add files, branch, merge, push to remote' stuff.
I was helping a designer-only friend of mine with the implementation of a basic website theme. After an hour of trying to talk them through how to use the github app (let alone git command line) I gave up and we just used dropbox.
The point being, sadly, I think that we're a ways off before the average non-technical person is comfortable using git.
FTP is a vastly simpler process to accomplish what it does -- transfer files from point A to point B. And if all you would be using Git for is, essentially, pushing the contents of a repository to a remote server, then it can sort of be akin to driving a Lamborghini Murcielago around to the corner store.
How is that going to help when over 10 million people are running WordPress on shared hosting accounts where MySQL and FTP are the only database and only file transfer options?
I don't see what would prevent those hosts from updating. Its not like installing SFTP and Postgres is that big of a deal (even on a huge deployment, it shouldn't take that long...)
Wordpress is growing popular, but at the cost of losing quality developers. Simply because its codebase has become horrible, memory-heavy and bloated. I understand Wordpress gives you the tools to build a CMS portal, etc. But it doesn't do one thing very well and tries to do multiple things pretty averagely. For example (this has been cited before) implementing pagination on the posts page and pages themselves is horrendous.
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:text
I think the CMS selection depends on the kind of organization that will be ultimately using and maintaining the site.
For 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...
On Windows 7 but yes, you were right. I got a new machine and the cleartype was not turned on yet. It looks much better now. http://i.imgur.com/73Ic6w0.png I appreciate your help.
I don't have the link and I'm reading this on the go, but Matt did some ad stuff that wasn't very kosher once upon a time. I seem to remember it was vaguely black hat seo and got Wordpress thunder banned on google for a minute.
Interesting timing, given that I literally just reread this before coming onto HN: http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=3890 As far as I'm aware, Wordpress.com never actually removed said blog. (Which I guess was probably a profitable decision - there was fuck-all outrage amongst anyone with a decent audience, compared to much more outrage when they did briefly pull a virulently transphobic radfem blog a few months ago. Ethically on the other hand...)
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.