7 ms·

Dear WordPress

111 points by muellerwolfram 13y ago

remi 13y ago
*WordPress
jbackus 13y ago
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/ http://pages.github.com/ [2] http://octopress.org/ http://octopress.org/ [3] https://medium.com/ https://medium.com/ [4] https://svbtle.com/ https://svbtle.com/
- pavs 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      >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 13y ago
        I'd say it was a mistake to be thinking that people who use Java or .Net aren't hackers. :)
    - dools 13y ago
      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.
  - fjk 13y ago
    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.
- nati 13y ago
  svbtle is very nice and clean
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    You can easily get the Svbtle theme in Wordpress by using wp-svbtle: http://wp-svbtle.themeskult.com/ http://wp-svbtle.themeskult.com/
    - username111 13y ago
      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.
      - eropple 13y ago
        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.
        bigiain 13y ago
        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)
- minimaxir 13y ago
  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)
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  > there is an increasing shift to minimalist blogging stacks I regret that this is bubble talk. If you think non-software types are going to publish blog posts at a command line, I don't know what else to say.
saltcod 13y ago
> 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?
- bryanh 13y ago
  http://gigaom.com/2008/01/22/wordpresscom-creator-raises-29m/ http://gigaom.com/2008/01/22/wordpresscom-creator-raises-29m... maybe? Not sure.
- kanamekun 13y ago
  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/ 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/ http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/
john-n 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
  - icelancer 13y ago
    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.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - jseliger 13y ago
    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 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.
3825 13y ago
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 https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro [2] http://i.imgur.com/9gOuTdH.png http://i.imgur.com/9gOuTdH.png
- arkitaip 13y ago
  Looks pretty nice on my box. Maybe you need to configure your font settings?
  - PetitPrince 13y ago
    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 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692
    - 3825 13y ago
      You're right. It even looks better on IE8. http://i.imgur.com/xrhfJGp.png http://i.imgur.com/xrhfJGp.png Here's a screenshot of nightly with a similar issue. http://i.imgur.com/HP02e5b.png http://i.imgur.com/HP02e5b.png Even this, with the font stripped out looks better http://i.imgur.com/6KB2iuG.png http://i.imgur.com/6KB2iuG.png
      - username111 13y ago
        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 13y ago
        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 http://i.imgur.com/73Ic6w0.png I appreciate your help.
neya 13y ago
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
- bergie 13y ago
  I wrote some suggestions on how to fix the WordPress developer experience a while ago: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/wordpress-decoupled/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/wordpress-decoupled/
- fjk 13y ago
  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.
tibbon 13y ago
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.
- adamors 13y ago
  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.
  - sgdesign 13y ago
    I'm not sure I agree about the "do not want to know" part. After 5 minutes with Git I don't see how anyone would want to stick with FTP… But yeah, the fact that WordPress hosting plays so badly with git is a big part of the reason why I probably won't be using it again.
    - alxhill 13y ago
      > After 5 minutes with Git I don't see how anyone would want to stick with FTP… You're assuming you're dealing with someone at least a bit technical. To them, FTP is drag and drop, git is either 'hacking' or magic.
      - krapp 13y ago
        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.
        ceol 13y ago
        Yes, the folks using version control of any kind, let alone git, are in the minority.
philfreo 13y ago
What's the mistake he references?
- josh2600 13y ago
  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.
devmach 13y ago
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/ http://wordpress.org/plugins/really-static/
- Nux 13y ago
  WOW! I'll be pushing this plugin everywhere! It solves lots of problems (theoretically). Why isn't everyone using it?
thomseddon 13y ago
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 http://profiles.wordpress.org/mikelittle
makomk 13y ago
Interesting timing, given that I literally just reread this before coming onto HN: http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=3890 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-mullenweg-about-the-silencing-of-lesbian-and-feminist-activists/ http://weirdward.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/email-to-matt-mull...
wordsmith 13y ago
For those interested, Matt Mullenwag on This Week in Startups: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP7B0oWTR3o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP7B0oWTR3o
nhangen 13y ago
Says the guy who sold his audience on free but built a business on anything but.
Nodex 13y ago
Don't forget to thank wordpress for all the hacked installations that contribute to DDOS around the world and it's modues with their poor security! No really - Kudos :P

111 points by muellerwolfram 13y ago

remi 13y ago

*WordPress

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/ http://pages.github.com/ [2] http://octopress.org/ http://octopress.org/ [3] https://medium.com/ https://medium.com/ [4] https://svbtle.com/ https://svbtle.com/

pavs 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    >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 13y ago
      I'd say it was a mistake to be thinking that people who use Java or .Net aren't hackers. :)
  - dools 13y ago
    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.
- fjk 13y ago
  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.
nati 13y ago
svbtle is very nice and clean
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  You can easily get the Svbtle theme in Wordpress by using wp-svbtle: http://wp-svbtle.themeskult.com/ http://wp-svbtle.themeskult.com/
  - username111 13y ago
    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.
    - eropple 13y ago
      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.
      - bigiain 13y ago
        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)
minimaxir 13y ago
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)
jacques_chester 13y ago
> there is an increasing shift to minimalist blogging stacks I regret that this is bubble talk. If you think non-software types are going to publish blog posts at a command line, I don't know what else to say.

saltcod 13y ago

> 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?

bryanh 13y ago
http://gigaom.com/2008/01/22/wordpresscom-creator-raises-29m/ http://gigaom.com/2008/01/22/wordpresscom-creator-raises-29m... maybe? Not sure.
kanamekun 13y ago
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/ 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/ http://ma.tt/2005/04/a-response/

john-n 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.
- icelancer 13y ago
  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.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- jseliger 13y ago
  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 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.

3825 13y ago

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 https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Source+Sans+Pro [2] http://i.imgur.com/9gOuTdH.png http://i.imgur.com/9gOuTdH.png

arkitaip 13y ago
Looks pretty nice on my box. Maybe you need to configure your font settings?
- PetitPrince 13y ago
  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 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692
  - 3825 13y ago
    You're right. It even looks better on IE8. http://i.imgur.com/xrhfJGp.png http://i.imgur.com/xrhfJGp.png Here's a screenshot of nightly with a similar issue. http://i.imgur.com/HP02e5b.png http://i.imgur.com/HP02e5b.png Even this, with the font stripped out looks better http://i.imgur.com/6KB2iuG.png http://i.imgur.com/6KB2iuG.png
    - username111 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        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 http://i.imgur.com/73Ic6w0.png I appreciate your help.

neya 13y ago

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

bergie 13y ago
I wrote some suggestions on how to fix the WordPress developer experience a while ago: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/wordpress-decoupled/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/wordpress-decoupled/
fjk 13y ago
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.

tibbon 13y ago

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.

adamors 13y ago
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.
- sgdesign 13y ago
  I'm not sure I agree about the "do not want to know" part. After 5 minutes with Git I don't see how anyone would want to stick with FTP… But yeah, the fact that WordPress hosting plays so badly with git is a big part of the reason why I probably won't be using it again.
  - alxhill 13y ago
    > After 5 minutes with Git I don't see how anyone would want to stick with FTP… You're assuming you're dealing with someone at least a bit technical. To them, FTP is drag and drop, git is either 'hacking' or magic.
    - krapp 13y ago
      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.
      - ceol 13y ago
        Yes, the folks using version control of any kind, let alone git, are in the minority.

philfreo 13y ago

What's the mistake he references?

josh2600 13y ago
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.

devmach 13y ago

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/ http://wordpress.org/plugins/really-static/

Nux 13y ago
WOW! I'll be pushing this plugin everywhere! It solves lots of problems (theoretically). Why isn't everyone using it?

thomseddon 13y ago

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 http://profiles.wordpress.org/mikelittle

makomk 13y ago

Interesting timing, given that I literally just reread this before coming onto HN: http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=3890 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-mullenweg-about-the-silencing-of-lesbian-and-feminist-activists/ http://weirdward.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/email-to-matt-mull...

wordsmith 13y ago

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

nhangen 13y ago

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

Nodex 13y ago

Don't forget to thank wordpress for all the hacked installations that contribute to DDOS around the world and it's modues with their poor security! No really - Kudos :P