

Dear WordPress - muellerwolfram
http://ma.tt/2013/05/dear-wordpress/

======
john-n
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.

~~~
khet
I get the feeling that those who "like" wordpress are either heavily invested
in the platform or can't read code.

Simpler, more specialised blogging engines are so beautifully designed, I
don't see myself ever wanting to work with Wordpress again.

~~~
jseliger
_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.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _I bet they'll resemble. . . Wordpress._

Are we still talking about actual code here? Because if so, I'll take that
bet.

------
jbackus
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.

[1] <http://pages.github.com/>

[2] <http://octopress.org/>

[3] <https://medium.com/>

[4] <https://svbtle.com/>

~~~
pavs
Highly unlikely. Wordpress is the opposite of simplicity, its highly
configurable and thats (one of the reasons) why its so widely used.

HN or hacker community is a very small community and its hardly the microcosm
of the internet.

~~~
ishansharma
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!

~~~
coldtea
> _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.

~~~
ownagefool
I'd say it was a mistake to be thinking that people who use Java or .Net
aren't hackers. :)

------
saltcod
> 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.

What's all that about, I wonder?

~~~
kanamekun
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/>

------
thomseddon
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 :)

[1] <http://profiles.wordpress.org/mikelittle>

------
tibbon
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.

~~~
dangrossman
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?

~~~
Nux
Many shared hosting providers nowadays offer SSL FTP and even SFTP. It's just
a question of educating the users.

~~~
tibbon
Exactly. I don't expect all users to start manually SSH'ing into systems, but
at least use SSL FTP or SFTP.

------
neya
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

~~~
fjk
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.

------
devmach
A little tip :

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...

[0] : <http://wordpress.org/plugins/really-static/>

~~~
Nux
WOW! I'll be pushing this plugin everywhere! It solves lots of problems
(theoretically). Why isn't everyone using it?

------
wordsmith
For those interested, Matt Mullenwag on This Week in Startups:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP7B0oWTR3o>

------
3825
Dear Matt,

Could you please use any font other than Source Sans Pro[1]? It looks terrible
on at least one major desktop operating system.[2]

[1] <https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro>

[2] <http://i.imgur.com/9gOuTdH.png>

~~~
arkitaip
Looks pretty nice on my box. Maybe you need to configure your font settings?

~~~
PetitPrince
That's because he use Chrome on Windows, who doesn't render webfont well due
to the usage of GDI instead of DirectWrite in the Windows version:
<https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692>

~~~
3825
You're right. It even looks better on IE8. <http://i.imgur.com/xrhfJGp.png>

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>

~~~
username111
Are you on XP? (I ask because it looks like you don't have any anti-aliasing
on).

If you adjust your cleartype settings (or turn it on in XP) it will look a bit
more normal.

~~~
3825
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.

------
remi
*WordPress

------
nhangen
Says the guy who sold his audience on free but built a business on anything
but.

------
philfreo
What's the mistake he references?

~~~
josh2600
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.

That's just off the top of my head.

------
makomk
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...)

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...](http://weirdward.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/email-to-matt-mullenweg-
about-the-silencing-of-lesbian-and-feminist-activists/)

