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>> Wordpress core continues to be basically a simple blog engine I think you need to think beyond personal and marketing blogs. WordPress is much much more...

>> Wordpress core continues to be basically a simple blog engine I think you need to think beyond personal and marketing blogs. WordPress is much much more... Quartz (qz.com) is built on WP. So was Wired (wired.com) and The New Yorker (www.newyorker.com). I had a hand in both The New Yorker and Wired and may other large media companies are built on WP. To characterize it as a "simple blog engine" is mis-leading. Gutenberg, while having its teething problems, is a big change. Big changes will cause upheaval. It will cause both petty and important disputes to rise to the surface. I think this is no different.

OtterCoder 8y ago
No, it is a simple blog engine that has been stretched, shimmed, cranked, and jerry-rigged beyond all recognition and sanity. The very idea that people try to host e-commerce on the platform is an embarrassment and a shame to security and safety. It encourages the pattern of hiring non-technical staff to manage the blog-store-landing-page-franken-whatever site, who are in turn encouraged to install reams of untrusted code via plugins. It is built on a frankly bizarre pattern of page and route management. It uses broken versions of a fairly broken language. It is enormously resource-hungry. I could go on, but to sum up, my experience working with WordPress has been nothing but a repeated nightmare.
- deleted 8y ago
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pmlnr 8y ago
<rant-ish content> agreeing with sibling, WordPress _is_ a blog engine that has been twisted and squeezed to support other things. BuddyPress is probably the ugliest manifestation of this, one of the slowest, sluggiest, buggiest things I've ever touched. I praise the extreme simplicity of the WordPress database structure, but that is also a very serious limitation. Examples if issues: - WP is ridiculously rigid when you want to scale it - that is due to having it's file storage as and actual file storage, without any abstraction. - The media library is an utter mess since the backbone.js mockery added in 3.5, with inconsistent use of filter and hooks on backend vs frontend. - It's forcing compatibility with long dead PHP versions. (5.2. That is before namespaces.) - I only supports MySQL but maintains MyISAM compatibility, so no foreign innodb keys, no cascade delete, no nothing. It should never have wished to become other, than a blog/small website engine without first making long, long overdue backend fixes. But instead, for many years now, I'm seeing the community being neglected; features that are questionable, pushed through (emojis, REST API, Gutenberg); WP.org without a clear focus, and without answering decades old threads, like a database abstraction layer. All that said, WordPress is easy to use - but I'd welcome an extremely simple, WYSIWYG, small, static site builder instead, with proper support for media, portfolios, galleries, with a WordPress importer, which could easily take over the mess, that WordPress, my once loved CMS had become. </rant-ish content>
snowwrestler 8y ago
Hi, I have huge respect for you and what you did at the NYer, it's a great site. I guess my point is... how would you break down the functionality of those sites by Wordpress core, themes or plugins, and custom code? How much of what makes those sites great comes "out of the box" from Wordpress, vs being bolted on or written from scratch?
- donohoe 8y ago
  For The New Yorker, the main site (sections, articles, tag pages) was its own theme. We used off-the-shelf plugins for for curation/features: ACF, EditFlow, Yoast (SEO). We also used custom Plugins for building out curation and full content feeds for our iOS app, managing podcasts, and AB testing. Quartz was different. We only relied on the WP editorial UI (with EditFlow plugin) and simplified the templates to just deliver JSON (this was before they had the JSON-API in core).We built an independent web app on top of that. Hope that helps answer your questions.

OtterCoder 8y ago

No, it is a simple blog engine that has been stretched, shimmed, cranked, and jerry-rigged beyond all recognition and sanity. The very idea that people try to host e-commerce on the platform is an embarrassment and a shame to security and safety. It encourages the pattern of hiring non-technical staff to manage the blog-store-landing-page-franken-whatever site, who are in turn encouraged to install reams of untrusted code via plugins. It is built on a frankly bizarre pattern of page and route management. It uses broken versions of a fairly broken language. It is enormously resource-hungry. I could go on, but to sum up, my experience working with WordPress has been nothing but a repeated nightmare.

deleted 8y ago
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pmlnr 8y ago

<rant-ish content> agreeing with sibling, WordPress _is_ a blog engine that has been twisted and squeezed to support other things. BuddyPress is probably the ugliest manifestation of this, one of the slowest, sluggiest, buggiest things I've ever touched. I praise the extreme simplicity of the WordPress database structure, but that is also a very serious limitation. Examples if issues: - WP is ridiculously rigid when you want to scale it - that is due to having it's file storage as and actual file storage, without any abstraction. - The media library is an utter mess since the backbone.js mockery added in 3.5, with inconsistent use of filter and hooks on backend vs frontend. - It's forcing compatibility with long dead PHP versions. (5.2. That is before namespaces.) - I only supports MySQL but maintains MyISAM compatibility, so no foreign innodb keys, no cascade delete, no nothing. It should never have wished to become other, than a blog/small website engine without first making long, long overdue backend fixes. But instead, for many years now, I'm seeing the community being neglected; features that are questionable, pushed through (emojis, REST API, Gutenberg); WP.org without a clear focus, and without answering decades old threads, like a database abstraction layer. All that said, WordPress is easy to use - but I'd welcome an extremely simple, WYSIWYG, small, static site builder instead, with proper support for media, portfolios, galleries, with a WordPress importer, which could easily take over the mess, that WordPress, my once loved CMS had become. </rant-ish content>

snowwrestler 8y ago

Hi, I have huge respect for you and what you did at the NYer, it's a great site. I guess my point is... how would you break down the functionality of those sites by Wordpress core, themes or plugins, and custom code? How much of what makes those sites great comes "out of the box" from Wordpress, vs being bolted on or written from scratch?

donohoe 8y ago
For The New Yorker, the main site (sections, articles, tag pages) was its own theme. We used off-the-shelf plugins for for curation/features: ACF, EditFlow, Yoast (SEO). We also used custom Plugins for building out curation and full content feeds for our iOS app, managing podcasts, and AB testing. Quartz was different. We only relied on the WP editorial UI (with EditFlow plugin) and simplified the templates to just deliver JSON (this was before they had the JSON-API in core).We built an independent web app on top of that. Hope that helps answer your questions.