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Why NASA Chose WordPress for Revamping Its Flagship Website
- wkat4242 3y agoThey're trying the SpaceX "move fast and break things" approach. With WordPress they're certainly going to get the latter with every update :)
- monkey_monkey 3y agoNo they're not. But if you're ok with parotting no-thought tropes, go for it.
- wkat4242 3y agoHmm I have seen a lot of wordpress and especially the plugins tend to be very hit and miss when it comes to stability and updates. It's pretty bad and it really means you have to constantly update them to be reasonably secure. There's a whole service for scanning its vulnerabilities: https://wpscan.com/ https://wpscan.com/ Of course every other product has vulnerabilities too but they are not that easily and heavily exploited.
- monkey_monkey 3y agoWordPress updates breaking existing sites was your original complaint. Now it's "but there are lots of plugins with security exploits".
- wkat4242 3y agoNot just security exploits, also breaking updates. And plugins are unavoidable in the WordPress ecosystem unless you really just need a simple personal blog. Together with the security need to constantly upgrade due to the many vulnerabilities makes it a big headache. You can't afford to leave some updates slide and then you have to deal with all the incompatibilities and issues of plugin updates.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- winrid 3y agoI run a WP extension and haven't had things break in the three years I've maintained it. Is this really a thing? This seems like a good boring tech choice.
- GenerocUsername 3y agoAmazing that it took a year for a "double gold plus WordPress partner" to decide to use WordPress. Really looks like they considered alternatives. All that said, WordPress is a fine choice for this use case. My joke is only about it taking so long to reach a foregone decision
- mistrial9 3y agofor better or for worse, this is part of the culture and practice at NASA. For several decades they appear from the outside (to me) to be armies of slugs and meeting-addicts. Yet look at the original tooling? the amazing engineering -- not in macro, but in the parts -- that comes out over and over. Then you get humans in that machine who are genuinely competent, somehow. We need NASA to work, they do have a great t-shirt. Maybe "slow" is the antidote to ADHD here on the nets?
- swagempire 3y agoWhat are the serious alternatives though -- I'm not current in the website / blog space.
- thevagrant 3y agoThey could have stayed with Drupal. V9 and 10 are much improved
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoDjango and Wagtail.
- swagempire 3y agoAh, right-- Django
- lwhi 3y agoI really can't understand why an organisation would choose wordpress. What are the benefits over an enterprise CMS like Drupal 10?
- gustavorg 3y agoNo idea, but after 27 years of web developments (yes I started around 1996) I would choose Wordpress every day and twice on Sundays. I have used Drupal, Joomla and Codeigniter extensively, and yet my answer today is, Wordpress.
- lwhi 3y agoI've never really delved into wordpress deeply; but it feels like the ecosystem is fragmented, lacks any standards and is littered with proprietary plugins that are no longer supported by the authors; and create conflicts with other plug-ins on the installation. Am I incorrect?
- doublerabbit 3y agoNope. That is why Wordpress wins.
- lwhi 3y agoThis isn't a very convincing argument.
- doublerabbit 3y agoBecause of the fractured plugins that exist for WordPress is what makes WordPress the strongest contender than any other CMS. Even though they may be security ridden, bug ridden, exploitable leading to an increase of DDoS, Crypto mining, and malware spreading and exploitation there is no other CMS out there that has the sheer amount of plugins that WordPress has. Wordpress as well has a large pool of developers, designers who you can hire commission for cheap to create your brand compared to any other. Better?
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- eggy 3y agoI just checked out SpaceX for comparison. What stack are they using for their web page? I am not a webdev, so not sure where to look. I found an article where they use C/C++ for flight systems, Python, and Chromium and JS for Dragon Crew UI,not the real-time stuff.
- hbcondo714 3y ago> As part of the project, NASA’s website infrastructure was migrated from an Amazon Web Services environment to WordPress.com VIP. I wonder how this move affected their cloud spend. WordPress VIP plans start at US$25,000/year: https://wpvip.com/pricing/ https://wpvip.com/pricing/
- rmccue 3y agoNo doubt they’d have been spending an equivalent amount across AWS and cloud engineer staffing; I also doubt that they’re on VIP’s entry plans, given the compliance, support, and traffic. (I work on a similarly-priced competitor to VIP.)
- WeAddValue 3y agowagtail.io, a Django/Python CMS, lists NASA as one of its users ... but is not mentioned in the article. The article says the migration was from Drupal to WP. Was that just fake news on wagtail.io?
- wkat4242 3y agoYeah it could be an internal thing too. At my work we used mediawiki heavily but only for intranet.
- rmccue 3y agoEnterprises tend to use a variety of CMSes. According to https://torchbox.com/blog/nasa-jpl-launches-on-wagtail/ https://torchbox.com/blog/nasa-jpl-launches-on-wagtail/ only JPL was on Wagtail; I believe that’s now also on WordPress, albeit a separate install of it. (I recently spoke to some of the people who worked on these sites; may be misremembering!)
- smt88 3y ago> wagtail.io, a Django/Python CMS, lists NASA as one of its users I can't speak about wagtail.io specifically, but a lot of "used by..." sections on websites are based on email signups. For example, if I run a SaaS and someone @nasa.gov signs up to try it out, I can then list NASA as one of my users, even if they just tested it and never put it into production.
- dylan604 3y agoAnd lose respect from anyone with an inking of common sense. Nobody cares about who you’ve demoed your software to. People care about who is using it. Marketing like this and the people that choose to do it are the absolute worst.
- leetrout 3y agoJPL and others use Wagtail. NASA is big. https://torchbox.com/blog/nasa-jpl-launches-on-wagtail/ https://torchbox.com/blog/nasa-jpl-launches-on-wagtail/
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- minroot 3y agoHow are PHP haters doing now? :)
- smt88 3y agoPeople hate(d) PHP for the developer experience, not because it can't or shouldn't run massive websites at scale. Anyway if NASA is using WP like most people do, the vast majority of pageviews are cached, meaning WP itself is more of a page builder than a server. As someone who ran a digital agency for a while and inherited a lot of WP sites, I will say that there are few things more miserable in the dev world than managing a WP site with lots of custom functionality. It's the worst of all worlds (PHP without structure or version control, Turing-complete plugin architecture that makes security impossible, code running anywhere can monkey-patch any other functionality in the entire site, etc.)
- twodave 3y agoYep, this is a big reason I pulled all my wife's old blogs out of WP and moved them into static sites. The reduced (removal of, really) threat model alone has been so worth it.
- jacobyoder 3y agoYou can impose a structure process around wordpress - version control, more of an OO approach, etc - but you're then somewhat out of step with the rest of the wordpress ecosystem. It becomes harder to use anything from the 'regular' wordpress world, which is part of the (often a prime) reason for its continued popularity; an extremely large ecosystem. And... the availability of "wordpress developers" hinges on people being able to do the 'fast and loose' thing as needed. I know there are WP devs/agencies that use version control for all their stuff, but it's the opposite of how most people learn and work in wordpress.
- vorticalbox 3y agoTweeting about ghost.org I would expect.
- phoboslab 3y ago
- workfromspace 3y ago> Lone Rock Point, a WordPress.com VIP Gold Agency Partner, led the project OTOH their website https://lonerockpoint.com https://lonerockpoint.com is terribly slow on my (Safari @ M1 Pro)...
- 90-00-09 3y agoLooks like they load all assets directly from the "wp-content/uploads" folder (unless they reverse proxy this path to a CDN, which is unlikely). Plus custom fonts.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]