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So, pick a database, use DenoDB and then use the lowest-common-denominator feature set of all the databases it supports. There's a great parable from almost tw

So, pick a database, use DenoDB and then use the lowest-common-denominator feature set of all the databases it supports. There's a great parable from almost two decades ago. Movable Type was a popular open source blogging platform that used an ORM and supported multiple database backends. Wordpress only supported MySQL. Remember Movable Type? I hacked on both and preferred working with Perl and PostgreSQL but the ORM layer was a pain to use. Thousands of other developers apparently agreed, as the Wordpress extension ecosystem thrived and Movable Type bombed.

Aeolun 5y ago
Of course. Developers experienced enough to see the benefits of and understand an ORM will likely not be working on your average Wordpress site.
evanelias 5y ago
Initial disclosure: I worked for Six Apart (makers of Movable Type) a dozen years ago, so maybe I'm still inadvertently biased, but I certainly try not to be. Wordpress won out for a number of reasons, mostly relating to licensing (Movable Type temporarily went non-FOSS at a critical moment in time), ease of hosting (PHP vs Perl), ease of dynamic content (MT generated static pages), and better company product focus (MT's parent company tried doing too many things at once and ran out of money). I say this as someone who doesn't love ORMs, so don't get me wrong here, but I've never seen a serious analysis that ranked MT's ORM layer anywhere as a factor in WP's dominance. The vast majority of MT users used MySQL anyway, and MT's ORM definitely had first-class support for MySQL. In 2010, MT 5 dropped support for Postgres and SQLite entirely. I was in Six Apart's Services org, mostly developing MT plugins for larger MT users, but also occasionally WP plugins as well. Personally I quite liked MT's ORM at least circa MT 4.x, and found that developing MT plugins was far more enjoyable than WP plugins at the time. (fwiw I was equally fluent in Perl and PHP, so that wasn't a factor.) MT had a very powerful plugin system that, combined with Perl's ability to "monkey patch", essentially allowed you to hook into pretty much any part of the CMS or page generator that you wanted. Back when MT was popular, it had a thriving extension ecosystem that very much rivaled Wordpress's, so it is simply not accurate to say MT bombed due to a poor extension ecosystem. Yes, eventually WP's ecosystem was massively larger, but that also simply tracks with size of PHP developer community vs size of Perl developer community over time.

Aeolun 5y ago

Of course. Developers experienced enough to see the benefits of and understand an ORM will likely not be working on your average Wordpress site.

evanelias 5y ago

Initial disclosure: I worked for Six Apart (makers of Movable Type) a dozen years ago, so maybe I'm still inadvertently biased, but I certainly try not to be. Wordpress won out for a number of reasons, mostly relating to licensing (Movable Type temporarily went non-FOSS at a critical moment in time), ease of hosting (PHP vs Perl), ease of dynamic content (MT generated static pages), and better company product focus (MT's parent company tried doing too many things at once and ran out of money). I say this as someone who doesn't love ORMs, so don't get me wrong here, but I've never seen a serious analysis that ranked MT's ORM layer anywhere as a factor in WP's dominance. The vast majority of MT users used MySQL anyway, and MT's ORM definitely had first-class support for MySQL. In 2010, MT 5 dropped support for Postgres and SQLite entirely. I was in Six Apart's Services org, mostly developing MT plugins for larger MT users, but also occasionally WP plugins as well. Personally I quite liked MT's ORM at least circa MT 4.x, and found that developing MT plugins was far more enjoyable than WP plugins at the time. (fwiw I was equally fluent in Perl and PHP, so that wasn't a factor.) MT had a very powerful plugin system that, combined with Perl's ability to "monkey patch", essentially allowed you to hook into pretty much any part of the CMS or page generator that you wanted. Back when MT was popular, it had a thriving extension ecosystem that very much rivaled Wordpress's, so it is simply not accurate to say MT bombed due to a poor extension ecosystem. Yes, eventually WP's ecosystem was massively larger, but that also simply tracks with size of PHP developer community vs size of Perl developer community over time.