3 ms·

Someone needs to leverage WASM and other container methods to build an entirely new version of WP with a solid architecture that can still leverage the existing

Someone needs to leverage WASM and other container methods to build an entirely new version of WP with a solid architecture that can still leverage the existing ecosystem by isolating/sandboxing popular themes and plugins and making them think they are running in WP.

mmaunder 2y ago
https://wasmlabs.dev/articles/wordpress-in-the-browser/ https://wasmlabs.dev/articles/wordpress-in-the-browser/
- whalesalad 2y ago
  I mean more of a new core that is non-php, non-wordpress that can leverage these ancillary things at the perimiter via something like this. So method calls to `wp_get_archives` would still work, but that would be redirected under the hood to a cleaner arch on something like Python, or Golang, or Rust, or whatever.
  - appendix-rock 2y ago
    This sounds like some sort of attempt at Ultimate Scope Creep. How did we get from ‘licensing faux-issue’ to ‘a complete rebuild with a very complex architecture just to support the plugin ecosystem’?
    - whalesalad 2y ago
      WP has needed this for a very long time, this is just the proverbial straw breaking the camels back.
      - bigiain 2y ago
        > WP has needed this for a very long time Said no-one using WP for their website ever. To a first approximation, about zero people/companies have a problem they need solved which boils down to "I need a replacement for WordPress using a significantly more modern and better architected codebase." By far the most common problem people are solving by using Wordpress is "I need to be able to fix website errors/typos without calling up a web development agency and waiting 2 weeks and paying $1000, and I need to be able update my homepage or add new pages which then fit into the menus and site navigation easily". Second most common problem they're solving is "I need a website which is easy and affordable to employ or contract experience people to edit and manage it for me". Not a single WPEngine or wordpress.com customer has ever chosen or rejected them because they asked themselves "Is this run on a mess of legacy early 2000s vintage PHP and badly designed MySQL databases, or does the backend run beautifully architected and formatted Rust/Haskel/Go?"
        whalesalad 2y ago
        I don’t want to hear it. I’d posit I’ve been working with WP longer than you. Ask yourself: why did WP engine come into existence?
        bigiain 2y ago
        > I’d posit I’ve been working with WP longer than you. Perhaps? Maybe I'm older than I look... I've never specialised in WP, but my earliest WP work was on 2.5 back in 2008-ish after I jumped ship from a gruelling (and failing) startup. I was doing mostly WP sites at an agency during 2010-2013 almost all using cPanel shared hosting. In 2014 I moved to a place using Wordpress on Plesk shared hosting which had several really bad downtimes and performance problems, and searching my email the first WPEngine invoice came when I migrated a bunch of those sites to WPE in 2015. I've been happily using and recommending them ever since. Sure there are lots of people with more year's experience, but I've got a good 15 years or so, and I think that means my opinions are at least based in the real world. WPEngine came into existence, at least from my point of view, because there was so much _bad_ Wordpress hosting available at the time. My experience with 7 years of shared cPanel/Plex hosting on random ISPs or some generalised everything-to-everybody domain registry, domain registrar, web hosting company, SEO consultants, internet security snake oil salesmen like GoDaddy or Dreamhost, compared to specialist WP hosting with WPEngine - has been night and day. Where I work now, we happily refer clients looking for $5/month web hosting away to a few sole trader web devs we respect who handle those sorts of customers, and anyone who doesn't bat an eyelid at WPEngine's prices (plus our markup) gets hosted there with all the performance, uptime, and value add benefits they bring to the table. I'm sure other people have different experiences. IU;m sure there are other dedicated WordPress hosting companies out there these days who are as good or better than WPEngine at least for some use cases. I'm sure there are other companies with as good or nearly as good offerings for less money than WPEngine. For me though, they are absolutely worth the extra cost for all the value add they bring alongside WP core and wordpress.org repos - except for people looking for lowest possible cost and are prepared to accept worse performance and less good hosting tools.
bigiain 2y ago
No. Not from my point of view, as someone who has a couple of dozen WordPress clients. "Someone" needs a CMS that's able to be securely, performantly, and professionally managed by hosting companies, and that is as easy for small and medium businesses to use and as easy to find experienced staff and agencies to help run. We do not recommend as use WordPress because of it's "solid architecture" or "isolation/sandboxing" or it's FE Dev buzzword de jour use of "exciting" "new" technology. We recommend it because the Widget Factory owner can probably get one of his grandkids or niece/nephews to act as website editor for him, or the piano teacher can get one of their students to help out with their website in return for discounted lessons, or the online store owner can easily employ someone with WordPress admin experience to get themselves off eBay/Marketplace and onto their own website. Or the lawyer/plumber/accountant/whoever's office manager or "that young staff member who's good with computers" can run Wordpress - perhaps with assistance of their existing outside IT consultants to install/manage it and perhaps setup/customise it initially. None of those people care about whether it's written in Rust, or uses WASM, or is dockerized and autoscaling. Their #1 problem is "can I quickly update my website if I find an error or if I have to put an important message to my customers on my homepage?" #2 is "can I easily learn how to do simple edits to my site, and can I easily find employees can work with it, and can I finb contractors/agencies who'll be able to help with more complex changes/updated?" and somewhere down below #1 is "is my site at least reasonably secure from being hacked, and if it is hacked can I get it restored/repaired rapidly". There are dozens or hundreds of "better technology choices" that WordPress these days. It's really hard to find a "better business choice" for a lot of projects though.
- whalesalad 2y ago
  All of your arguments go out the window when the foundation disappears. That’s what is happening now. Wordpress isn’t good in and of itself. It’s good due to the community of developers working on it, and likewise the plugins they have painstakingly created (despite the terrible programming environment) That’s gone now.
  - bigiain 2y ago
    Yes. and that's sad. Very sad. Having said that, it seems that many people (me included) have been assuming things about "the WordPress Foundation" that are not true. It apparently is _not_ the steward of the wordpress.org repository of 3rd party themes and plugins the "community of developers" painstakingly created, and that have made WordPress "good" for so many different people. As far as I can tell, "the foundation" does whatever it does on a tax filing declared budget of around $22,000 (so, not much?) - and it exists mostly as a non profit "owner" of some trademarks that it immediately exclusively and irrevocably licensed for commercial use back to Automattic the same day they got given them. I'm pretty sure "the foundation" could have disappeared anytime in the last decade, or could remain to exist for another decade or two to come, and either way wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference. It's not the foundation that's gone, it's the trust in the Wordpress core development leadership, the trust in the wordpress.org theme/plugin leadership, and the trust that the WordPress trademark is safe to use in perfectly normal and legal ways without the treat of being extorted if you start making too much money.

mmaunder 2y ago

https://wasmlabs.dev/articles/wordpress-in-the-browser/ https://wasmlabs.dev/articles/wordpress-in-the-browser/

whalesalad 2y ago
I mean more of a new core that is non-php, non-wordpress that can leverage these ancillary things at the perimiter via something like this. So method calls to `wp_get_archives` would still work, but that would be redirected under the hood to a cleaner arch on something like Python, or Golang, or Rust, or whatever.
- appendix-rock 2y ago
  This sounds like some sort of attempt at Ultimate Scope Creep. How did we get from ‘licensing faux-issue’ to ‘a complete rebuild with a very complex architecture just to support the plugin ecosystem’?
  - whalesalad 2y ago
    WP has needed this for a very long time, this is just the proverbial straw breaking the camels back.
    - bigiain 2y ago
      > WP has needed this for a very long time Said no-one using WP for their website ever. To a first approximation, about zero people/companies have a problem they need solved which boils down to "I need a replacement for WordPress using a significantly more modern and better architected codebase." By far the most common problem people are solving by using Wordpress is "I need to be able to fix website errors/typos without calling up a web development agency and waiting 2 weeks and paying $1000, and I need to be able update my homepage or add new pages which then fit into the menus and site navigation easily". Second most common problem they're solving is "I need a website which is easy and affordable to employ or contract experience people to edit and manage it for me". Not a single WPEngine or wordpress.com customer has ever chosen or rejected them because they asked themselves "Is this run on a mess of legacy early 2000s vintage PHP and badly designed MySQL databases, or does the backend run beautifully architected and formatted Rust/Haskel/Go?"
      - whalesalad 2y ago
        I don’t want to hear it. I’d posit I’ve been working with WP longer than you. Ask yourself: why did WP engine come into existence?
        bigiain 2y ago
        > I’d posit I’ve been working with WP longer than you. Perhaps? Maybe I'm older than I look... I've never specialised in WP, but my earliest WP work was on 2.5 back in 2008-ish after I jumped ship from a gruelling (and failing) startup. I was doing mostly WP sites at an agency during 2010-2013 almost all using cPanel shared hosting. In 2014 I moved to a place using Wordpress on Plesk shared hosting which had several really bad downtimes and performance problems, and searching my email the first WPEngine invoice came when I migrated a bunch of those sites to WPE in 2015. I've been happily using and recommending them ever since. Sure there are lots of people with more year's experience, but I've got a good 15 years or so, and I think that means my opinions are at least based in the real world. WPEngine came into existence, at least from my point of view, because there was so much _bad_ Wordpress hosting available at the time. My experience with 7 years of shared cPanel/Plex hosting on random ISPs or some generalised everything-to-everybody domain registry, domain registrar, web hosting company, SEO consultants, internet security snake oil salesmen like GoDaddy or Dreamhost, compared to specialist WP hosting with WPEngine - has been night and day. Where I work now, we happily refer clients looking for $5/month web hosting away to a few sole trader web devs we respect who handle those sorts of customers, and anyone who doesn't bat an eyelid at WPEngine's prices (plus our markup) gets hosted there with all the performance, uptime, and value add benefits they bring to the table. I'm sure other people have different experiences. IU;m sure there are other dedicated WordPress hosting companies out there these days who are as good or better than WPEngine at least for some use cases. I'm sure there are other companies with as good or nearly as good offerings for less money than WPEngine. For me though, they are absolutely worth the extra cost for all the value add they bring alongside WP core and wordpress.org repos - except for people looking for lowest possible cost and are prepared to accept worse performance and less good hosting tools.

bigiain 2y ago

No. Not from my point of view, as someone who has a couple of dozen WordPress clients. "Someone" needs a CMS that's able to be securely, performantly, and professionally managed by hosting companies, and that is as easy for small and medium businesses to use and as easy to find experienced staff and agencies to help run. We do not recommend as use WordPress because of it's "solid architecture" or "isolation/sandboxing" or it's FE Dev buzzword de jour use of "exciting" "new" technology. We recommend it because the Widget Factory owner can probably get one of his grandkids or niece/nephews to act as website editor for him, or the piano teacher can get one of their students to help out with their website in return for discounted lessons, or the online store owner can easily employ someone with WordPress admin experience to get themselves off eBay/Marketplace and onto their own website. Or the lawyer/plumber/accountant/whoever's office manager or "that young staff member who's good with computers" can run Wordpress - perhaps with assistance of their existing outside IT consultants to install/manage it and perhaps setup/customise it initially. None of those people care about whether it's written in Rust, or uses WASM, or is dockerized and autoscaling. Their #1 problem is "can I quickly update my website if I find an error or if I have to put an important message to my customers on my homepage?" #2 is "can I easily learn how to do simple edits to my site, and can I easily find employees can work with it, and can I finb contractors/agencies who'll be able to help with more complex changes/updated?" and somewhere down below #1 is "is my site at least reasonably secure from being hacked, and if it is hacked can I get it restored/repaired rapidly". There are dozens or hundreds of "better technology choices" that WordPress these days. It's really hard to find a "better business choice" for a lot of projects though.

whalesalad 2y ago
All of your arguments go out the window when the foundation disappears. That’s what is happening now. Wordpress isn’t good in and of itself. It’s good due to the community of developers working on it, and likewise the plugins they have painstakingly created (despite the terrible programming environment) That’s gone now.
- bigiain 2y ago
  Yes. and that's sad. Very sad. Having said that, it seems that many people (me included) have been assuming things about "the WordPress Foundation" that are not true. It apparently is _not_ the steward of the wordpress.org repository of 3rd party themes and plugins the "community of developers" painstakingly created, and that have made WordPress "good" for so many different people. As far as I can tell, "the foundation" does whatever it does on a tax filing declared budget of around $22,000 (so, not much?) - and it exists mostly as a non profit "owner" of some trademarks that it immediately exclusively and irrevocably licensed for commercial use back to Automattic the same day they got given them. I'm pretty sure "the foundation" could have disappeared anytime in the last decade, or could remain to exist for another decade or two to come, and either way wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference. It's not the foundation that's gone, it's the trust in the Wordpress core development leadership, the trust in the wordpress.org theme/plugin leadership, and the trust that the WordPress trademark is safe to use in perfectly normal and legal ways without the treat of being extorted if you start making too much money.