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I’ve been a WordPress dev since 3.0. It is a tool. And a very good one. Its market share dominance it not because it is proprietary (it is not) or because of v

I’ve been a WordPress dev since 3.0. It is a tool. And a very good one. Its market share dominance it not because it is proprietary (it is not) or because of vendor lock in (there is none). It is because it works very well, it is lightweight, it runs pretty much on any host, and is friendly to devs and end users. Part of being a good dev is knowing which tool to use (and when to not use a tool) and how to get the most out of the tool.

theteapot 5y ago
Wordpress is lightweight? 5.9 download is +19.7M zipped and that's without any plugins. The lock in to the Wordpress framework. Not sure whether that qualifies as "vendor" lock in but it's pretty big dep that's impossible to break out of if you go beyond simple blog.
- 1over137 5y ago
  Everything is relative. I just downloaded a Xerox firmware update that was almost 500 MB.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  You can easily get locked in to some theme builder or UI toolkit. half the WP folks I know swear by X (genesis theme, etc) and will just rewrite everything in theme X if they take over a project. You're not 'locked in' to WP, you're 'locked in' to themes and plugins.
- ghostly_s 5y ago
  Do they even offer VPS storage in units smaller than a GB these days? No one cares about a 20MB binary.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    For what it's worth, I'm running the absolute cheapest DigitalOcean droplet money can buy ($5/mo) and that comes with 25GB of NVME storage as standard.
    - KronisLV 5y ago
      The smallest VPSes that i've found are the Scaleway Stardust instances, which have 10 GB of storage: https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/ I don't think that it's very economical to provide smaller instances than that for most cloud hosts out there.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  that s the size of the smallest mobile app
KronisLV 5y ago
If you'd like to share some of your wisdom as someone who has worked with it for such a long time, i posted another question here in regards to actually utilizing WordPress for CRUD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30179205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30179205
chrismorgan 5y ago
I have become convinced that words like “lightweight” and “fast” have lost all meaning in software circles. You’ll get two projects describing themselves in similar terms because they’re comparing themselves to wildly different things. (For example: Hexo and Zola both have a heading on their front pages titled “blazing fast”, but for equivalent loads Zola will be much faster than Hexo, probably a minimum of 5–10×, and Zola isn’t even particularly optimised, just written in Rust.) The WordPress download is 20MB compressed, 63MB uncompressed, containing almost half a million lines of PHP spread across over a thousand files (~16MB; around 55% code, the remainder blank or comments), over half a million lines of JavaScript in over 500 files (~25MB; around 67% code), a couple of hundred thousand of CSS in 700 files (~7.5MB; around 75% code), and the odd spot of other languages. (This is in languages where more code fairly directly means slower, even if faster code can claw that back; whereas in compiled languages, more code just means slower compilation, and runtime performance is comparatively uncorrelated.) That’s not particularly lightweight. Conceptually WordPress isn’t lightweight, either. I’ve never used WordPress myself, but I’ve seen three people using it, and in each case they were being drowned in choices and data fields, using two or three fields out of the thirty or more fields it was shoving in their faces; and the themes and plugins and such made matters considerably worse and more complex; and a lot of that complexity didn’t seem well-structured, though my observation has only ever been brief.

theteapot 5y ago

Wordpress is lightweight? 5.9 download is +19.7M zipped and that's without any plugins. The lock in to the Wordpress framework. Not sure whether that qualifies as "vendor" lock in but it's pretty big dep that's impossible to break out of if you go beyond simple blog.

1over137 5y ago
Everything is relative. I just downloaded a Xerox firmware update that was almost 500 MB.
mgkimsal 5y ago
You can easily get locked in to some theme builder or UI toolkit. half the WP folks I know swear by X (genesis theme, etc) and will just rewrite everything in theme X if they take over a project. You're not 'locked in' to WP, you're 'locked in' to themes and plugins.
ghostly_s 5y ago
Do they even offer VPS storage in units smaller than a GB these days? No one cares about a 20MB binary.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  For what it's worth, I'm running the absolute cheapest DigitalOcean droplet money can buy ($5/mo) and that comes with 25GB of NVME storage as standard.
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    The smallest VPSes that i've found are the Scaleway Stardust instances, which have 10 GB of storage: https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/ I don't think that it's very economical to provide smaller instances than that for most cloud hosts out there.
cblconfederate 5y ago
that s the size of the smallest mobile app

KronisLV 5y ago

If you'd like to share some of your wisdom as someone who has worked with it for such a long time, i posted another question here in regards to actually utilizing WordPress for CRUD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30179205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30179205

chrismorgan 5y ago

I have become convinced that words like “lightweight” and “fast” have lost all meaning in software circles. You’ll get two projects describing themselves in similar terms because they’re comparing themselves to wildly different things. (For example: Hexo and Zola both have a heading on their front pages titled “blazing fast”, but for equivalent loads Zola will be much faster than Hexo, probably a minimum of 5–10×, and Zola isn’t even particularly optimised, just written in Rust.) The WordPress download is 20MB compressed, 63MB uncompressed, containing almost half a million lines of PHP spread across over a thousand files (~16MB; around 55% code, the remainder blank or comments), over half a million lines of JavaScript in over 500 files (~25MB; around 67% code), a couple of hundred thousand of CSS in 700 files (~7.5MB; around 75% code), and the odd spot of other languages. (This is in languages where more code fairly directly means slower, even if faster code can claw that back; whereas in compiled languages, more code just means slower compilation, and runtime performance is comparatively uncorrelated.) That’s not particularly lightweight. Conceptually WordPress isn’t lightweight, either. I’ve never used WordPress myself, but I’ve seen three people using it, and in each case they were being drowned in choices and data fields, using two or three fields out of the thirty or more fields it was shoving in their faces; and the themes and plugins and such made matters considerably worse and more complex; and a lot of that complexity didn’t seem well-structured, though my observation has only ever been brief.