
Google dedicates engineering team to accelerate development of WordPress - ibdf
https://searchengineland.com/need-speed-google-dedicates-engineering-team-accelerate-development-wordpress-ecosystem-291214
======
harryf
So after taking over one blogging platform and mothballing it (Blogger), then
wiping out a host of 200X startups with Google Reader and _then_ killing
Google Reader, which effectively killed RSS... after all that Google has woken
up to the fact that the last source of independent content, that's not big-
media-owned or stuck in a walled garden like FaceBook is Wordpress?

And back in 2007ish I remember bloggers crying out to Google for help with
some tools /APIs to help combat comment spam and Google basically ignoring it,
leading to the eventual death of blog comments and blog based discussion.

Looking at all that, it's great to finally see Google trying to support
bloggers - the people that have delivered some of the most interesting content
in their index.

Or am I too jaded?

~~~
smnrchrds
I still hate Google for killing Reader. I imagine its death was only a minor
inconvenience in the US, but it was a sad day for internet freedom in Iran.

At the time, Iran had for a couple of years implemented an internet censorship
platform, blocking access to much of the internet. Nearly all international
news agencies (CNN, BBC, NPR, etc.) were inaccessible; so were most of "web
2.0".

Despite the widespread censorship, there was a large active community of
independent blogs, non-sanctioned news sites, and small e-publications. The
reason this structure could thrive was that even though these websites and
weblogs were blocked, they were accessible through Google Reader.

Because of the way Google services were implemented, the government could not
block Reader without also blocking GMail and Google Search, which was not an
option. As long as authors had a way (like a not-yet-blocked VPN or a friend
outside the country they could email to) to post articles, people could read
them, like them, comment on them, etc. Iran's censorship was to significant
degree neutralized by this setup. The community was large, strong, and
thriving. They even had their own jargon: the community was referred to as
blogestan [1]; Google Reader was called Gooder, etc.

And then, Google, for some (now obviously incorrect, but ultimately irrelevant
to my point) financial calculation, decided to kill Reader. Just like that,
overnight, the breadth of the web accessible to an average Iranian decreased
by orders of magnitude. The entire community of freethinking authors and their
followers disappeared. The only news websites remaining accessible were those
sanctioned by the government, pushing the official narrative.

Google put a large nail in the coffin of internet freedom in Iran. For that, I
will never forgive them.

[1] with the -stan suffix,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-stan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-stan)

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
How is it Google's responsibility to help you defy your country's onerous
laws?

~~~
nine_k
Google declared many times that they do care about freedom of information, do
not endorse censorship, etc.

If their policies were a bit more cohesive, maybe the people who killed Reader
would have remembered these declarations, and maybe decided differently.

------
everdev
I've worked with WordPress for over 9 years and set up probably over 100
sites, but can't wait for it to die.

It's easy to setup and the ecosystem is great, but the security issues are
massive and there's really no reason for content to be stored in a database
for the majority of sites.

I hope a static site generator comes along with an intuitive UI for non-
technical people to easily update their own content.

~~~
jchung
> I hope a static site generator comes along with an intuitive UI for non-
> technical people to easily update their own content.

Does this not exist? Would love to offer that to some of my non-technical team
members.

~~~
nas
There are a number of them. Jekyll and Hyde are two of them. Wordpress is a
security disaster, IMHO.

~~~
konschubert
I can't speak for Hyde, but Jekyll requires you to edit text files which makes
it unaccessible for non-technical people.

~~~
rozenmd
There's Netlify + GatsbyJS - takes git know-how to setup, but once you're
there it's a Rich Text Editor on a webpage controlling your content

~~~
tdhz77
Add contentful and you have a admin dashboard and hundreds of integrations.

I set this up last week and it’s amazing. It costs $0 for my small project.

I’ve aleo rolled out it out to event websites. And they love it too.

No database is a big win for bloggers, who should focus on content and not
security.

~~~
chimen
$249 lowest pricing package after you stretch out pass the free limitations.

~~~
tdhz77
I won’t be hitting a million hits on the api for 99.9% of my projects.

------
SemiEarlyGoogle
Wow, the Google Developer's Advocate blog post
([https://medinathoughts.com/2018/01/29/wordpress-
google/](https://medinathoughts.com/2018/01/29/wordpress-google/)) sounds like
Google is very serious about Wordpress.

Hopefully it leads to great stuff. Historically, there's been near zero
interest in php/wordpress amongst the engineering ranks. Everyone wants to
learn the Next Big Language/Library/Framework, which is understandable.

Many current/former Googlers have been interested in helping out with a
project I'm involved in (GXJam.com), but the conversation ends quickly when I
tell them it's WP/php/MySQL.

------
dhruvkar
It'd be interested to know what percentage of WordPress sites are 'content-
only' static sites. i.e. users are not logging and/or getting personalized
content.

WordPress seems overkill for that niche, and this may be an opportunity to
build and sell tools that allow easy publishing for static sites, given the
July 2018 update.

~~~
user5994461
Wordpress has comments and statistics, so there is no blog that is strictly
static.

~~~
dhruvkar
there are still options to handle comments (disqus, facebook comments etc.)
that don't need a database on your server.

there's solutions for pretty much every dynamic aspect of a blog. If wordpress
is slow, and google is going to penalize your search ranking, it's worth
looking into.

~~~
CM30
And by using said other options, you give control of your users to a walled
garden service. Do we really want more of the internet centralised around
Facebook and its ilk?

~~~
KajMagnus
Maybe then Talkyard ([https://www.talkyard.io/blog-
comments](https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments)) is interesting to you:

It's hosted & serverless, like Facebook and Disqus.

But at the same time, it's open source, so you will be able to export your
comments from Talkyard's servers, install Talkyard yourself and import the
comments.

(But I haven't yet built export and import functionality :- P )

------
butz
WordPress by itself is pretty fast, but some 3rd party plugins really add up
to load times by making lots of queries to database and loading unoptimized or
unnecessary assets. In mean time most online WP tutorials "solve" issues by
suggesting to install yet another plugin.

~~~
pathartl
Really 99% of the arguments I hear about WordPress are because of the
community of "developers". Don't get me wrong, there are tons of great
developers in the community that are actively working on great features for
WordPress either in the form of core or plugins. What I'm specifically
referring to are content maintainers that know some CSS, use themes like
Avada, and know their go-to plugins to make bloated and convoluted, hard-to-
maintain sites.

Really I think where WordPress actually lacks is in the API department. The
almost non-sensical approach to partially implemented OOP kills any ambition I
have to create a site without my own weird abstraction layer I wrote on top of
it all.

~~~
kevinyen
Wordpress has built-in REST API, beginning from their 4.7 release.
[http://v2.wp-api.org/](http://v2.wp-api.org/)

~~~
pathartl
I'm talking about their PHP API

------
onion2k
How long until WordPress themes are all AMP-enabled as a part of WP core and
the option is enabled by default?

~~~
user5994461
It's already the case.

~~~
poxrud
That is not true, you need a plugin to enable AMP.

------
keyboardhitter
I wonder if this is intended to be competition with managed Wordpress
providers such as WP Engine? the article doesn't distinguish between
Wordpress.org (domain.wordpress.org) and Wordpress.com (self hosted)
platforms. Perhaps both, with such a large partnership. But in the developer's
linked blog post he seems to be referring to the self-hosted platform by
mentioning themes and plugins. Very interested to see how this progresses.

~~~
kevinyen
Yeah, it reads like self-hosted is their focus. Make sense too.

If Google offered a WP hosting solution (a la WP Engine) on the Google Cloud,
I'd be very very interested. I don't think Google will do it anytime soon
though.

~~~
thesandlord
WP Engine is a GCP partner: [https://wpengine.com/try/google-cloud-
platform/](https://wpengine.com/try/google-cloud-platform/)

And GCP has a page dedicated to Wordpress:
[https://cloud.google.com/wordpress/](https://cloud.google.com/wordpress/)

(I work for GCP)

~~~
kevinyen
Yes, I've seen GCP documentation on WP get better and better each year. Still
very different from a managed-hosting offering like WP Engine.

Can you put me on GCP/WP waitlist if such an offering is in the works? ;)

------
pdfernhout
Maybe this bug I filed two years ago about how WordPress loads every version
of a post into memory when you go to edit it (and does that three times) will
finally get fixed? "High memory usage ( and possible server error) editing
post with many/large revisions"
[https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/34560](https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/34560)
"Right now, you will unhappily see "500 server error" and "white screen of
death" results eventually if you, say, edit a 400K page for hundreds of
revisions, even with a 256MB server memory limit. ... So, it seems that
WordPress was indeed loading all the revisions of a post _three_ times when
editing it with the edit_form_advanced: once to count the revisions, once to
list the timestamps and other metadata of the revisions, and once to check for
the latest autosaved revision (if any)."

------
ggm
Wordpress runs major league newspaper sites too. Not to disrespect the
blogoverse, but there may be a direct efficiency statement for major time, ad
revenue sources of daily news. Google may well be feeding the beast, to feed
themselves, but not blogs per se: blogging s/w for news websites.

------
maleno
Just last night I found myself watching some Wordpress-related videos on the
Chrome Developers Youtube channel [0], building on a talk given at the Chrome
Dev Summit last year [1]. The Docker implementation is something I'd been
considering for a complex Wordpress install recently, so it caught my eye.
Building in more PWA features is no harm either.

I have no idea what it all means for the bigger picture of
Wordpress/Google/Automattic, but these are nice little tips and ideas to start
with anyway.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jav5hPmUaUw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jav5hPmUaUw)
[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di7RvMlk9io](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di7RvMlk9io)

~~~
llarsson
If deploying WordPress using Docker, and WordPress scalability interests you,
please have a look at this [0] article I wrote, as it shows how you can get a
really good WordPress install up and running. I used containers and deployed
on CoreOS (yes, it is a bit old -- Kubernetes was not very stable back then).
For the deployment stuff, you can read that here [1].

[0] [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scalable-wordpress-
architectu...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scalable-wordpress-architecture-
lars-larsson)

[1] [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/automation-scalable-
wordpress...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/automation-scalable-wordpress-
using-docker-coreos-etcd-lars-larsson/)

------
stevenicr
Glad to see more pro coders helping with wordpress, if ya'll get a few extra
hours, buddypress could use some help too! and that could put the screws to
fcbook if someone makes an easy to deploy droplet / docker / nextcloud like
thing with a few plugins and anti-spam / privacy settings.

Unfortunate that this announcement has the cloud of Google over it. Just about
anything google is untrusted and tarnished, not just in the tech circles that
know how it profits at the expense of others, but more and more by average
people who are getting a clue that google today is nothing like it once was,
or once tried to make itself be perceived anyway.

More and more searches are censored, more ads on screen and less of the
interesting things to find, services killed off, no customer service,
frustrated web site owners... I still have a smidgen of hope for google fiber,
but the rest of the brand is not much different than fcbook in my mind, and
many others are starting to see the tech companies that put money ahead of
giving people what they really expect.

This announcement would get more exiting cheers if it read "ex-googlers team
of engineers to help dev wordpress"

Of course we all wonder if the politics that hit the browsers and standards
will come to play - but honestly it would make sense to help shore up a
product that runs so much of the web, even if google wasn't trying to get it's
claws deeper into other software - just producing faster sites that are hacked
less will help with the google search results - so just that alone is win win
win.

I'm cleaning up hacked wp sites tonight actually, yay.

------
com2kid
Sounds like a good thing! My company's WordPress site[0] takes 4-8 seconds to
load, with a couple paragraphs of text and a few images.

To be fair, I should really switch it over to being a static site, I am using
a complicated templating engine to pop out a few paragraphs.

Of course that is the ultimate irony about WordPress. Like any other swiss
army knife framework, it will always be slower than a proper dedicated tool.

Another issue (one that a lot of modern development practices share) is that
WordPress lets you quickly pull in components to Get Things Done Quick, but
those components pull in more dependencies. I was looking at adding some more
smooth scrolling effects, and the suggested way was to pull in jquery (fair
enough), even though the template I'm using already pulls it into the page.
Repeat that a dozen or so times to get the page looking Just Right, and, well,
there goes perf.

[0][https://www.thawd.net/](https://www.thawd.net/)

~~~
RobGR
There's no reason a PHP based site should take that long to load. It would
seem that you are missing some caching settings, regenerating something every
page load, or have something wrong with your server setup.

Make sure you are using a recent version of PHP and appropriate WP caching
plugins.

Also check to see if your DB is hanging when a connection is made to it,
perhaps due to trying to reverse lookup the IP for logging purposes and
waiting for that to time out, or something else simple like that.

~~~
com2kid
> There's no reason a PHP based site should take that long to load. It would
> seem that you are missing some caching settings, regenerating something
> every page load, or have something wrong with your server setup.

Out of the box settings, ugh.

Full second to parse jquery, 1/2 for jquery, 1/2 for jquery migrate. Something
called wp-emoji-release.min.js is taking another 396 ms.

And this is after repeatedly visiting the page in my browser. I thought the
browser was supposed to cache stuff? Heh.

Then again, according to Chrome, the page only took 1.4 seconds in total. I'm
wondering where the remaining 4 seconds of me staring at an empty browser tab
is coming from. :/

Then again, switching pages on my WordPress admin page takes ~6 seconds, so I
think there is just a significant probability than my VPS has miserable
performance.

Edit: Installing a caching plugin makes the page load not as horribly slow. It
is at 3 seconds now, which is still 2 more than I'd like, but at least
acceptable.

~~~
RobGR
Look at the Cache-Control header and see if the site is telling the browser
not to cache the JS.

Also, look at the time-to-first-byte . . . if that is high, maybe further
tweaks to the cache plugin settings may help you. If you are not using at
least PHP version 7.0 you will get a noticable improvement by getting to that
as well.

------
ProAm
Goodbye Wordpress.

------
IronWolve
Hope some of these speed tweaks make it into other CMS like Drupal.

------
merb
maybe it gets object storage?

