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Yeah, I know the web hosting landscape has changed since WordPress took off, but if the goal of Discourse was to be the WordPress of forums, using Ruby and Post

by cwyers 10y ago

Yeah, I know the web hosting landscape has changed since WordPress took off, but if the goal of Discourse was to be the WordPress of forums, using Ruby and Postgres instead of PHP/MySQL seems like a big misstep.

penpapersw 10y ago
Well also, they seem to have a weird idea of what "modernizing" a web app means. While it's true that traditional web forums have plenty of usability issues, I don't really think Discourse actually solves them. It just hides them with fancier ones IMO.
CM30 10y ago
As was having the system not well suited to running on shared hosting accounts. That's because (for good or bad) the vast majority of websites are hosted on fairly cheap shared hosting accounts on large webhosts, where access to the server is heavily restricted and language choices are often limited to PHP/MySQL. WordPress (and most traditional forum scripts like phpBB) work fine in these situations. Just upload a few files, set up a database and run the installer to get the thing working. Discourse doesn't. It also generally isn't integrated into one click install software like Softaculous or Fantastico. This means that the audience using a typical shared host like Hostgator and clicking a button in their CPanel to set up their site can't easily use Discourse like they could WordPress. So yeah, that's an issue here too. Discourse just requires too much control over your server for most shared hosting accounts and can't easily be integrated into one click install setups/setup by merely uploading a bunch of files. So the mass market won't ever touch it.
- simplehuman 9y ago
  I think vps is the new web host. We have products like cloudron, yunohost coming up to serve that market.
braveo 10y ago
When Jeff Atwoord originally announced Discourse he claimed his biggest goal was to kill off PHP for good, and he wrote Discourse in Ruby specifically to convince everyone else to move off of the "one true holdout" that PHP still dominated... online forums. I'm honestly not a huge fan of Jeff Atwoods, and that started long before he started SO. To me it just feels like he's a bit too idealistic in his approach to things.
- jjeaff 10y ago
  Funny that he would say that. Co spidering the fact that a huge majority of ALL web based open source software seems to be PHP even today.

by cwyers 10y ago

penpapersw 10y ago

Well also, they seem to have a weird idea of what "modernizing" a web app means. While it's true that traditional web forums have plenty of usability issues, I don't really think Discourse actually solves them. It just hides them with fancier ones IMO.

CM30 10y ago

As was having the system not well suited to running on shared hosting accounts. That's because (for good or bad) the vast majority of websites are hosted on fairly cheap shared hosting accounts on large webhosts, where access to the server is heavily restricted and language choices are often limited to PHP/MySQL. WordPress (and most traditional forum scripts like phpBB) work fine in these situations. Just upload a few files, set up a database and run the installer to get the thing working. Discourse doesn't. It also generally isn't integrated into one click install software like Softaculous or Fantastico. This means that the audience using a typical shared host like Hostgator and clicking a button in their CPanel to set up their site can't easily use Discourse like they could WordPress. So yeah, that's an issue here too. Discourse just requires too much control over your server for most shared hosting accounts and can't easily be integrated into one click install setups/setup by merely uploading a bunch of files. So the mass market won't ever touch it.

simplehuman 9y ago
I think vps is the new web host. We have products like cloudron, yunohost coming up to serve that market.

braveo 10y ago

When Jeff Atwoord originally announced Discourse he claimed his biggest goal was to kill off PHP for good, and he wrote Discourse in Ruby specifically to convince everyone else to move off of the "one true holdout" that PHP still dominated... online forums. I'm honestly not a huge fan of Jeff Atwoods, and that started long before he started SO. To me it just feels like he's a bit too idealistic in his approach to things.

jjeaff 10y ago
Funny that he would say that. Co spidering the fact that a huge majority of ALL web based open source software seems to be PHP even today.