11 ms·

So long WordPress

333 points by ValentineC 2y ago

ttul 2y ago
It gets so much worse. Today, my sales guy was trying to register for WordCamp, a conference that we have been attending for years as an essential place to meet customers. And then he encountered the registration form for a WordPress.org login, which neatly specifies that you affirm you have no “affiliation with WP Engine, whether financial or otherwise.” [1] Of course, my company does have an affiliation with WP Engine. We use their service to host our website. Therefore, nobody on my team can register for a WordPress.org account. I wrote an open letter to Matt Mullenweg complaining about the requirement and stating that I believe it violates the Sherman Act and Section 3 of the Clayton Act by being an overly broad prohibition that is clearly anti-competitive and has no clear business justification (aside from limiting competition). Matt and the rest of the people backing Automattic should take note: Moves like this that destroy your community will eventually usher in a replacement. WordPress is pretty neat, but it only got that way because thousands of people put millions of hours into building add-ons and hosting services to make it blossom into what it is today. If their efforts are redirected in another direction, WordPress will wither away to nothing in a few years. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ksimpson_open-letter-to-matt-mullenweg-ceo-of-automattic-activity-7256742485203263488-2Jly?utm_source=combined_share_message&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_campaign=copy_link https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ksimpson_open-letter-to-matt-...
- diggan 2y ago
  > Of course, my company does have an affiliation with WP Engine. We use their service to host our website Does no one understand what "affiliation" means anymore? Just because I bought something from Amazon doesn't mean I'm now affiliated with Amazon. "Affiliation" (usually) means something like a formal association, partnership, or close connection, not that you're just a customer. Besides that, dump Wordpress regardless, clearly they've lost focus from the actual users and Matt seems to be fighting some war others can't even see the reason for.
  - netsharc 2y ago
    Isn't that what lawyers end up doing, arguing which definition of the word applies? And since (as far as I can surmise) elonmusk.php hasn't clarified what that word means in his checkbox, won't it be safer to be cautious?
    - dylan604 2y ago
      This brings back the horrid memories of what the definition of is is type of sentences
      - netsharc 2y ago
        How about an argument for millions of dollars due to a missing punctuation mark: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/missing-oxford-comma-just-changed-course-court-case-180962551/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/missing-oxford-com...
  - chiefalchemist 2y ago
    > "Matt seems to be fighting some war others can't even see the reason for." We see the reason. That reason is money. The lies / gaslighting aren't for OSS, etc. It's about MM's bottom line.
  - aksss 2y ago
    This is why any decent contract or agreement has a definitions section. Ambiguity in legal docs should always be minimized.
    - Terretta 2y ago
      On the contrary, it's why contracts use boilerplate. Boilerplate words have all been litigated. Boilerplate clauses are well understood. Affiliate, affiliated, affiliation, words like these are boilerplate, unless you go to the trouble of locally redefining.
      - 2y ago
- Kwpolska 2y ago
  Does merely hosting a website on WP Engine constitute an affiliation? I wouldn’t consider myself affiliated with Apple, Microsoft, or Volkswagen, just because I use their products and services.
  - morgancollett 2y ago
    I would say, no. Matt Mullenweg says, ask your lawyer. If only he'd said no as well - not doing so seems petty.
  - tejtm 2y ago
    Remember all those chapters of legal mumbo jumbo you had to click-thru just get on with your day? You may not consider yourself an affiliate but if the lawyers decide you are a teapot then you are either a teapot or were very rich.
  - badrequest 2y ago
    The author (and myself, coincidentally) used to work at WP Engine. I still have friends there, I could still describe their infrastructure if I had to. How am I not to interpret myself as "affiliated?"
- Fidelix 2y ago
  What a silly notion. You're not affiliated to a company merely because you are their customer.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    You believe that. I believe that. I'm sure my lawyer believes that. I'm sure Matt's does, too. I'd prefer not to have to convince a judge or jury to see it our way. If I were in the author's shoes, I don't know if I'd expose my company to that much of a legal risk with someone who's been acting "interestingly" recently. I'm not involved in any of this except as a spectator. I don't even use Wordpress. Just saying, I could see why someone might not want to split legal hairs with their leadership right now, even where it's very likely you'd win such an argument in court.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > I'm sure Matt's does, too I wouldn't be so sure. He seems to have gone off the deep end. I know folks, including some successful ones, who legitimately believe that anything that commercially hurts them is illegal, and when a judge sides against them, it's due to bias and not the law. (I don't know if this type of auto-victimisation has a name. You see it parodied by South Park in "The Worldwide Privacy Tour." And, less hilariously, by public figures complaining about their free speech on talk shows and at press conferences they called.)
      - kstrauser 2y ago
        All I know about the recent Matt and WordPress kerfuffle is what I've read here on HN. Based solely on what I've seen of his own comments here on these stories, I think you're right. What I meant in that sentence was "Matt's lawyers do, too", even if Matt might not think so. One time a friend of mine was showing me a bunch of fancy camera gear he'd bought for his wife's ghost hunting business. I pulled him aside and asked him if he really believe in the spirits and apparitions she talked about. He replied, "oh, for tax purposes I completely believe this bullshit." By analogy, even if Matt's lawyers privately agreed that a lawsuit over the meaning of "affiliation" is silly and doomed to lose, I can imagine them replying "oh, for billable hours I completely believe it."
- Molitor5901 2y ago
  The fact he is using Wordpress.org would seem to be a clear violation of its 501(c)(3) IRS status. If someone has not filed a complaint by now with the IRS perhaps they should. The C3 must be very careful in sharing staff with the for profit entity, and it must be very careful in how they interact.
  - robjwells 2y ago
    One of the revelations over the course of this saga was that WordPress.org != WordPress Foundation. It's under the personal control of Matt Mullenweg.
  - phonon 2y ago
    Wordpress.org is not part of the 501(c)(3). They tried, but the IRS turned them down. It's Matt's personal toy (staffed by people from Automattic), as far as anyone knows.
    - throwup238 2y ago
      Which is another signal that Matt isn’t serious about the Wordpress Foundation. The correct move would have been to form a for profit subsidiary owned by the foundation to run Wordpress.org since it’s an unrelated business activity. It’s a well trodden path used by tons of nonprofits like the Smithsonian, Mozilla, OpenAI, etc. when they need to operate something that the IRS won’t grant tax exemption.
      - phonon 2y ago
        Well, wordpress.org runs at a large loss...not clear how that could work exactly...
        throwup238 2y ago
        The Foundation gives its subsidiary money, just like any other parent company can. Whether or not Wordpress.org makes money is irrelevant to its for/non profit status. It’s a legal technicality due to IRS tax exemption rules for unrelated business activities. They have to put those operations into a separate subsidiary, even if it never makes any profit. If the nonprofit can’t afford to run Wordpress.org then the whole nonprofit was a farce anyway.
- chiefalchemist 2y ago
  I keep repeating this on X: He needs us. We don't need him. Unfortunately, anecdotally, there's a lot of group thinking in WordPress. It's one of the reasons "The WordPress way" is able to run counter to industry best practices. Most people don't know any better, and the handful who do don't speak up. It's a textbook case of toxic kindness. Given the collective actions / behaviors / culture, I've been saying this for close to 10 years: It's not a community. It's a cult.
  - lioeters 2y ago
    The other day I was thinking how communities around a programming language or software framework sometimes become toxic subcultures, where its members dogfood the product too much to the point where they can't think outside the box. I guess corporations take advantage of this mechanism of brainwash feedback loop to foster loyal employees who believe in the mission, who can speak the lingo and think in the given conceptual framework, no matter how arbitrary or wrong. It also leads to "big fish in a small pond" syndrome, where people in the inner circle start to think highly of themselves, to look down on the "newbies" and users. They value thier expertise in this niche without realizing its relative poverty and low quality in the larger context. It's a mix of arrogance and ignorance that insulates their ego. I hope the collective disillusionment that WordPress is going through will be healthy for ecosystem in the long run. Let a hundred forks and alternatives bloom!
    - chiefalchemist 2y ago
      That middle paragraph describes exactly my experiences with WordPress and that community. It's mediocrity and blindspots run wild.
  - nchmy 2y ago
    oh, indeed. The Wordpress community is overwhelmingly made up of half-wits
- froh 2y ago
  > Moves like this that destroy your community will eventually usher in a replacement. yes! bitkeeper tried licensing shenanigans and lost to git. smalltalk did licensing shenanigans and lost to Java. Qt almost died and motivated Gnome. In software, inacceptable licensing gives birth to your worst competitor. /s
  - ValentineC 2y ago
    WordPress has a huge moat in terms of brand entrenchment. Most business people in companies know what "WordPress" is.
- ankleturtle 2y ago
  The part which did it in for me was learning that Matt personally owns Wordpress.org. It's not the Foundation. It's not Automattic. It's Matt, personally. Nope, that's a bus factor of one. I'm done.
- itronitron 2y ago
  If people stop using WordPress, then presumably that will negatively impact WP Engine, which might be the whole point.
- 1123581321 2y ago
  That’s not what affiliation means. This checkbox is similar to T&C that “prevent” competitors from signing up. It’s more about having grounds to bring up WPEngine’s behavior in court if they check the box. It’s understandable you did not realize this, though, and perhaps that chilling effect was intended.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > I wrote an open letter to Matt Mullenweg complaining about the requirement and stating that I believe it violates the Sherman Act and Section 3 of the Clayton Act Send a copy to your state AG [1]. Copy your governor’s office [2] and state representatives if you have the time. [1] https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/ https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/ [2] https://www.usa.gov/state-governor https://www.usa.gov/state-governor
- wmeredith 2y ago
  "is pretty neat, but it only got that way because thousands of people put millions of hours into building add-ons and hosting services to make it blossom into what it is today." Insert Twitter, Reddit, Digg, MySpace, etc... at the beginning of that quote. The people who own the social networks rarely give a shit about the users once they hit critical mass. And the owners will eventually burn it down or enshitify it beyond recognition.
- tony2016 2y ago
  Just check No! What are they going to do? Check if you really do not have any kind of affiliation with WPEngine?
baggy_trough 2y ago
https://bullenweg.com https://bullenweg.com is getting spicy.
- breakingcups 2y ago
  This whole saga is just so bizarre
- sgerenser 2y ago
  what the heck did I just read?
  - docdeek 2y ago
    Pretty sure that is an extract from (one of) public lawsuits brought by former aides to MM’s mother that were employed by MM.
    - ValentineC 2y ago
      Possibly better background, with the lawsuits linked in the post: https://heatherburns.tech/2024/10/14/say-their-names/ https://heatherburns.tech/2024/10/14/say-their-names/
      - nchmy 2y ago
        Saying their names and getting all feely wont help them with their current, quite difficult, financial situation. It should have been launching a crowdsource campaign instead
  - doublerabbit 2y ago
    I know, I want my two seconds and mouse click back.
  - speed_spread 2y ago
    That was troubling me too, so: from what I understand (someone feel free to correct me if you know better), Mister Wordpress hired people to take care of his ill mother who seems to also have serious mental issues (ref. all the crazy sex talk and racism). One of the caregivers got fed up of the abusive behavior (which wasn't part of the contract) and complained multiple times to Mister Wordpress about it, who then told his mom she should stop making up crazy shit about him and just be a nice person to the people who are trying to help her. Which seems to have made it worse because she's just stark raving mad. Whether there are actual Asian women involved at all remains to be seen (ah) and is beside the point.
nacho2sweet 2y ago
The whole community and ecosystem is full of shady dishonest businesses and practices it seems. Besides all the recent drama as an end user and plugin buyer I have had to ask for 2 separate refunds from major plugins for shady dark pattern re-bills or secret upsells. I used to not consider myself a mark but maybe I am 42 now so I am starting to miss the real opt out buttons (4 pages deep below the fold). Anyways I don't like being in any ecosystem that is full of this stuff and not worth my time to manage all of it.
- lxe 2y ago
  A very large part of WordPress ecosystem is just incessant upsells for plugins and borderline scams.
- ankleturtle 2y ago
  If you really want to see the shady, dishonest side, try to have a discussion about nulling plugins. You'll get called every name in the book for adhering to the GPL.
  - kyleee 2y ago
    What does nulling plugins mean?
    - ankleturtle 2y ago
      It's the removal of "paywalls" (e.g., license checks, product keys, etc.) in plugins. A lot of developers see this as "stealing" and unethical.
hshshshshsh 2y ago
> I’ve officially left the WordPress project after 14+ years of contributing including: Sorry to be an asshole but this is a good lesson on not to over index your life on a single idea.
- pooper 2y ago
  Wordpress saga is spicy in itself but really this is also a wake up call for any programmer like me who is overly dependent on a single technology such as dotnet or java. However, what else can we do? There are only so many hours in a day. What reasonable alternative do I have?
  - TechDebtDevin 2y ago
    html doesn't have this issue :)
  - jjav 2y ago
    Using only open standards and open source with a suitable license. Being disciplined about this is very difficult, see RMS. But it is the way.
    - odo1242 2y ago
      I mean, Wordpress is open source with a suitable license (GPLv2). You can install plugins from wherever you want. So is every piece of software implicated in this drama, including Advanced Custom Fields (free edition) I really don’t see how the discussion of open source pertains to Wordpress
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - esskay 2y ago
    Sightly different comparing a cms to an entire programming language. A more apt comparison would be your career being entirely focused on Umbraco or OpenCMS rather than dotnet or java.
whalesalad 2y ago
WordPress has been a terrible tool for 10+ years. Good riddance.
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  Not really sure why anyone use WP in 2024 tbh.
  - sroerick 2y ago
    What better alternative is there as a webdev? Genuinely looking for answers from a production perspective. Most successful shops I meet or talk to are all-in on Wordpress and I don’t think this drama has affected this calculation. Big Indian SEO + Wordpress firms with American sales teams rule this market. I haven’t done freelance web work in a couple years, but I remember pouring a couple hundred hours into exploring static generators and alternative CMSs just to decide that yeah, Wordpress was probably the cheapest and most user friendly option to.
    - steviedotboston 2y ago
      Drupal is seriously worth another look if you haven't used it in a while. It's really a mature CMS that was completely rewritten a number of years ago. There's also currently an initiative underway to make a new "distro" of Drupal that is more user friendly and less developer focused, which could be great for people coming from WordPress. Drupal does have a learning curve, it doesn't have the robust marketplace of off the shelf themes that WP has, but I love it.
      - sroerick 2y ago
        I struggled with Drupal when I used it. I was responsible for taking over a crowdfunding site which had been built in Drupal and as an intermediate Wordpress and Django developer, I found Drupal’s learning curve insane and it felt like the entire ecosystem was stagnating and dying. There are a lot of Reddit posts that go something like “I took a pay cut to work on a stack other than Drupal and I’ve never been happier”. It’s also the second most hated stack after salesforce. I don’t know if any place where Drupal has been successfully used except for large corporate blogs, which I think it seems well suited for, but I’m happy to be corrected here. It wasn’t for me but I’m glad you like it! If you’re well suited to it I think it’s a great career path.
rtytry 2y ago
Trips me out people made an entire career with WP. My hat is off to them. WP is so hard for me to figure out. It is almost unbelievable that someone would commit their life to that insanity but I respect the hell out of them.
- simlevesque 2y ago
  I'm not sure what you think is so complex. I started doing plugins and themes for it at 15 years old and I'm no genius.
  - AndroTux 2y ago
    It’s not necessarily hard. But it’s cumbersome and just one of the worst codebases I ever had the pleasure of working with. Basically everything about it is legacy, bad design choices, hacks, workarounds and compatibility fixes. That’s what makes it complex. It needs a rewrite 10 years ago. But due to the deep integration of thousands of plugins that will never be possible.
  - creativenolo 2y ago
    From personal experience, the complexity comes from how ‘not obvious’, unexpected, or (outwith WordPress) unconventional much of WordPress is. It is a fascinating code base that is a result of it evolving through end user needs, over years, rather than being a grand software architecture with developer ergonomics at the core. Last time I touched it, changing domain names and sync dbs all required plugins. Yet in page editing works like magic. I assume no-one building Wordpress today would build it like it is build.
neiman 2y ago
Isn't every community is like that after so long? Like, I don't like the way that Matt behaved recently, but regarding most of the complains in the post -- these exist in any community or organization which is big enough and has been around for long enough.
- gitaarik 2y ago
  Yes but the difference here is that Matt has so much influence on the community that he is having a serious negative impact on it.
pier25 2y ago
He migrated his site ot Hugo: https://chriswiegman.com/2024/10/this-site-now-runs-on-hugo/ https://chriswiegman.com/2024/10/this-site-now-runs-on-hugo/ I can understand WP for non-technical users but I'm still amazed at web dev teams still not using static sites for blogs and marketing sites.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- TIPSIO 2y ago
  Usually it comes down: - easy client login for template tweaks, uploads, and redirects - forms - extremely minor server-side functionality thing WordPress is perfect for this.
  - sroerick 2y ago
    “Extremely minor server-side functionality thing” is where SSGs fail miserably. All of a sudden you’re using SaaS forms or whatever else, or your self hosting some other tremendously inferior CMS and your margins go out the window. Wordpress killer that accomplishes these things you mentioned would interest me. Statamic looks interesting in this context but it wasn’t super well formed 4 years ago when I dug deep into this ecosystem
    - amluto 2y ago
      20 years ago, CGI covered this use case pretty well. I wonder if anyone has tried to make a modern equivalent. Maybe something along the line of a Cloudflare Worker (but using the open source stack) or possibly something minimal and flexible based on WASM or JS that could be invoked from different servers could work.
      - sroerick 2y ago
        CGI / PHP is really not a bad way to work in 2024, even though I was traumatized by PHP in my early days. I’ve only experimented with it though, I think it would be hard to maintain at scale, and I’ve heard there are not insignificant security concerns. It’s a lot easier to hire somebody to maintain a Wordpress install than it is to mess with Apache or PHP. When I figured out that Wordpress literally is executing every piece of PHP every time the site loads it was kind of a “woah” moment for me Interesting idea with the Cloudflare thing
breck 2y ago
I'd like to take this chance to plug my new startup, the Printing Press. It's like WordPress, but instead of digital, it's physical. It requires no servers or computers at all. Just paper, which you can make from naturally growing trees, and ink (I'm not sure how that is made). Your blog will last a long time, like hundreds of years. You can read it while sitting over your poo hole. Visit our worksite and check it out. - Johnny Gutenberg
_fat_santa 2y ago
As a JS/React dev, I had to do some WP work a few years back and the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I found WP itself to be nice to work with but the ecosystem around it is just jarring. In the JS ecosystem if you have an issue then you usually go look it up and someone either recommends a fix or a NPM package to get around the issue you are having. With WP when you tried to figure out an issue it was always endless blogspam with an upsell to a plugin or consulting services in the end. I remember reading so many articles on really basic topics where the author would dance around the solution before finally going "well if you want the real answer, please hire my WP consulting firm and we can take a look". And with plugins I found it very hard to find anything open source or free. Every plugin, no matter how small, always seemed to have it's core features locked behind a "premium" version. Now I get it, plugins take time to develop and people want to be paid for their work but it was just really jarring to go from a community where folks contribute to developing the best solution for something together versus everyone hacking it on their own because they wanted to sell a plugin.
- nicce 2y ago
  If you wanted to modify some plugins and host the source in GitHub, for example, you were essentially writing your own plugins that modify other plugins to be able to do that.
- eXpl0it3r 2y ago
  I also only recently learned how much money is flowing in the WordPress "community". You ran into all these commercial plugins and consulting services, because that's what most of the WordPress community is. People having their own company, hosting or maintaining sites for others and on the side developing commercial plugins. To me this begs the question, whether making everything open source and available for free in your own free time or while working at some big corp as is the standard in the JavaScript world, is really the better alternative? At least the WordPress community has found a way to sustain themselves, provide services to tens of thousands of small to big businesses, while the JavaScript community seems to be mostly dependent on big tech to keep the lights on for most services.
  - 2y ago
mjrpes 2y ago
I'm planning to go through this recent thread of WordPress alternatives: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fsie1i/top_wordpress_alternatives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fsie1i/top_word... Any others that people recommend? Will be looking for a basic website platform, blog is secondary, no e-commerce, minimal use of plugins, open source and hostable, where everything can be done in a Web UI with exception maybe of site templates. API would be nice to help with conversion from WordPress.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mpol 2y ago
  ClassicPress would be the most painless transition. It is basically WordPress without the block editor. Most plugins and themes are compatible.
- 0311Ghost 2y ago
  I also think Classicpress would make the transition smooth. HTMLy also seems to be similar to what you describe. I've been trying it out with a couple of basic projects, and it seems to be a good option that I don't see many people mentioning.
throwawaymatt 2y ago
> I joined WP Engine in 2018 because it was the one company that really did seem to be honest about who they were. Like every other company they were in it to make money, but unlike every other company they didn’t hide that fact behind abusive language. They didn’t claim I was “family.” They didn’t claim their work was virtuous and therefore somehow “better” than non-WordPress orgs. No, they said they wanted to be the biggest host and went after that with the best pay I saw in the WordPress ecosystem and interesting work on top of it. Well said. Our agency chose WP Engine over 8 years ago because they were hands-down the best managed WordPress hosting provider. It revolutionized our WordPress hosting offerings and allowed stable, mostly headache free growth. Without the WP Engine's platform, and their investments in making WordPress hosting modular and safe we'd still be in the stone ages of dedicated/vps hosting. What kept us as a customer for these 8 years though, has been the quality of support. It can't really be measured, but I've found their support to be unmatched and highly competent over hundreds of interactions. We've grown over 400% with WP Engine and this entire fiasco with Matt blindsided us. Begrudgingly, we're diversifying our hosting allocations to protect against this new threat but we'd be much happier continuing with just WP Engine.
legitster 2y ago
> I’ve watched people pour their lives into giving back only to have it all tossed out because their important work isn’t what Matt wanted people to focus on. It's sentiments like this that really undercut Mullenweg's arguments. "WP Engine didn't contribute to core" when Core was just the preapproved feature list that was important to Automattic. Even if WP Engine wanted to contribute, their work would have just lined Automattic's pockets (hence why he just asked for money in the shakedown).
Trias11 2y ago
Wordpress is like microsoft. If you want to build a honeypot to attract malware and bad scripted traffic quickly - wordpress is the way. Do you need it? There are way better options today.
- gitaarik 2y ago
  There were always way better options
givan 2y ago
If you would like to go back on using a CMS instead of static generators please take a look at the one I'm building https://vvveb.com https://vvveb.com it shares the same principles of design and architecture simplicity with the freedom of open source.
- rsolva 2y ago
  Huh, this looks ... really, really good?
  - givan 2y ago
    Thank you.
- davidcollantes 2y ago
  Really, really well done! GitHub starred, and playing with it. Thank you for sharing!
  - givan 2y ago
    Thank you.
- remram 2y ago
  There's a "hero-1" tooltip on my screen when I hover basically anywhere on that landing page, it's a bit distracting.
  - givan 2y ago
    Thanks for feedback, I fixed it.
codingclaws 2y ago
I'm reading the WordPress docs right now as an experienced developer that hasn't used WordPress that much. It's kind of interesting. There's a whole REST API built into WordPress. And there's also a full on Node workflow that you can use to develop certain components.
- yurishimo 2y ago
  At its core, Wordpress is not bad software, it’s just old and shows it’s age sometimes. I’ve worked with a lot of really talented engineers who built their careers on Wordpress. News organizations powering the top breaking stories online run on WP. It’s a competent, mature, and extensible platform for developers, even if the modern marketing is not catered to devs. These days I’ve moved to Laravel but all of my friends in WP world are bummed that their livelihoods are being toyed with by the former BDFL now just DFL.
- abhiyerra 2y ago
  In a lot of ways it is not different from Rails or Django. Just approaching it from a non-technical market with a ton of plugins. You can in fact add an API and execute PHP or use it as an API Gateway. Definitely been tempted to use it but as others have said to do anything useful requires a ton of plugins that integrate in weird ways and have to pay subscriptions for the useful features. But still I think it is one of the best ways for non-technical people to creating websites quickly.
  - kyleee 2y ago
    Yes, interesting comment. It also well predates Laravel (not sure about Rails) and that plus backwards compatibility all the way back to archaic PHP versions explains some of the cruft (but not all of the suboptimal design).
maxbond 2y ago
There are no benevolent dictators. People who are serious about building community will put their trust in others. They will delegate. They will listen to advice. They will compromise. They will be imperfect; they will fail to do the best thing for the community from time to time. But when that happens, more often than not, they will listen and adapt to criticism. We may still call them BDFL. But they aren't truly a dictator. People building petty fiefdoms will inevitably betray the community. When I read about Mullenweg, something I'm struck by is his cry bullying. I see him responding to complaints like, "are you threatening me? I get a lot of death threats." I bet he does get death threats, and to be clear it's not okay that he and other public figures have their lives threatened. But it's common for him to respond to people telling him to go to hell as if they were making an actionable threat. See [0]. I would be upset if someone hoped I "[died] a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere." But I would know they were being hyperbolic and flipping me the bird, not making a threat. (Especially if I was familiar with Tumblr's culture and the texture of humor on the platform. Like you might expect from the CEO.) And I certainly wouldn't respond by doxing them. And this is really important; doxing someone is actually putting them in jeopardy, with no hyperbole. Doxing someone is an actionable threat of harassment. This is a betrayal of the community's trust, and the exercise of power against the community's interests. I've seen some other examples of him mischaracterizing insults (including milder ones than this) as threats, but I wasn't able to find them in my timebox. These were screenshots from Twitter and possibly Slack, presumably I could find them if I had accounts on those platforms. You can also look at the recent controversy as an exercise in cry bullying. "WP Engine is so unfair to the community," he cries. "They deprive people of the essential feature of having more than 3 revisions without changing a setting." Then cuts a large subset of the community off from things that are actually critical, like logging in and updating plugins. He betrayed the community and exercised his leadership position to prosecute his personal quarrels at the community's expense. I apologize if this was a rant, but here's the point. We should be thinking harder about open source governance, because there are no benevolent dictators. Positions of power corrupt, and they also attract the corrupt to them. When BBS operators were powerful in our community, they attracted (at least one) con artist(s) [1]; now we see a BDFL using our community to rule as a petty tyrant. When we want to adopt an up and coming project, we should ask the BDFL what the plan is for turning over power to democratic mechanisms in the community. When a new project starts only 1 or few people are there to make decisions, so a BDFL is the natural state of things. But we should expect governance to become more sophisticated as a project becomes more important. We should learn to recognize the rhetorical mechanism a petty tyrant uses to conflate their interests with the interests of the community. Be suspicious of them. Push back. Ultimately, there are two mechanisms to hold a petty tyrant accountable; forking and rewriting. We should be prepared to do that. Maintainers reading this might say, "oh, great, not only are people going to open up spurious issues and feel entitled to my time, but you're asking them to be a peanut gallery trying to hold me accountable to democratic mechanisms. What a pain in the ass." This is a solid objection which I do not have a good response to. Another objection I don't have an answer to is the very real issues projects like Redis and Elasticache have encountered, where platform giants capture the value without contributing back financially. That's a real problem I'm not smart enough to solve, and it does complicate what I'm suggesting. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-with-trans-user-over-account-ban-revealing-private-account-names-in-the-process/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTzQmhmgLC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTzQmhmgLC0
NationOfJoe 2y ago
People keep saying in this thread, there are better alternatives but i do not see any listed. i know of - Statamic (php, Laravel)- https://statamic.com/ https://statamic.com/ - Strapi (js) - https://strapi.io/ https://strapi.io/ and then a bunch of SaaS platforms. what are the market leading open source CMS's?

333 points by ValentineC 2y ago

ttul 2y ago

It gets so much worse. Today, my sales guy was trying to register for WordCamp, a conference that we have been attending for years as an essential place to meet customers. And then he encountered the registration form for a WordPress.org login, which neatly specifies that you affirm you have no “affiliation with WP Engine, whether financial or otherwise.” [1] Of course, my company does have an affiliation with WP Engine. We use their service to host our website. Therefore, nobody on my team can register for a WordPress.org account. I wrote an open letter to Matt Mullenweg complaining about the requirement and stating that I believe it violates the Sherman Act and Section 3 of the Clayton Act by being an overly broad prohibition that is clearly anti-competitive and has no clear business justification (aside from limiting competition). Matt and the rest of the people backing Automattic should take note: Moves like this that destroy your community will eventually usher in a replacement. WordPress is pretty neat, but it only got that way because thousands of people put millions of hours into building add-ons and hosting services to make it blossom into what it is today. If their efforts are redirected in another direction, WordPress will wither away to nothing in a few years. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ksimpson_open-letter-to-matt-mullenweg-ceo-of-automattic-activity-7256742485203263488-2Jly?utm_source=combined_share_message&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_campaign=copy_link https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ksimpson_open-letter-to-matt-...

diggan 2y ago
> Of course, my company does have an affiliation with WP Engine. We use their service to host our website Does no one understand what "affiliation" means anymore? Just because I bought something from Amazon doesn't mean I'm now affiliated with Amazon. "Affiliation" (usually) means something like a formal association, partnership, or close connection, not that you're just a customer. Besides that, dump Wordpress regardless, clearly they've lost focus from the actual users and Matt seems to be fighting some war others can't even see the reason for.
- netsharc 2y ago
  Isn't that what lawyers end up doing, arguing which definition of the word applies? And since (as far as I can surmise) elonmusk.php hasn't clarified what that word means in his checkbox, won't it be safer to be cautious?
  - dylan604 2y ago
    This brings back the horrid memories of what the definition of is is type of sentences
    - netsharc 2y ago
      How about an argument for millions of dollars due to a missing punctuation mark: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/missing-oxford-comma-just-changed-course-court-case-180962551/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/missing-oxford-com...
- chiefalchemist 2y ago
  > "Matt seems to be fighting some war others can't even see the reason for." We see the reason. That reason is money. The lies / gaslighting aren't for OSS, etc. It's about MM's bottom line.
- aksss 2y ago
  This is why any decent contract or agreement has a definitions section. Ambiguity in legal docs should always be minimized.
  - Terretta 2y ago
    On the contrary, it's why contracts use boilerplate. Boilerplate words have all been litigated. Boilerplate clauses are well understood. Affiliate, affiliated, affiliation, words like these are boilerplate, unless you go to the trouble of locally redefining.
    - 2y ago
Kwpolska 2y ago
Does merely hosting a website on WP Engine constitute an affiliation? I wouldn’t consider myself affiliated with Apple, Microsoft, or Volkswagen, just because I use their products and services.
- morgancollett 2y ago
  I would say, no. Matt Mullenweg says, ask your lawyer. If only he'd said no as well - not doing so seems petty.
- tejtm 2y ago
  Remember all those chapters of legal mumbo jumbo you had to click-thru just get on with your day? You may not consider yourself an affiliate but if the lawyers decide you are a teapot then you are either a teapot or were very rich.
- badrequest 2y ago
  The author (and myself, coincidentally) used to work at WP Engine. I still have friends there, I could still describe their infrastructure if I had to. How am I not to interpret myself as "affiliated?"
Fidelix 2y ago
What a silly notion. You're not affiliated to a company merely because you are their customer.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kstrauser 2y ago
  You believe that. I believe that. I'm sure my lawyer believes that. I'm sure Matt's does, too. I'd prefer not to have to convince a judge or jury to see it our way. If I were in the author's shoes, I don't know if I'd expose my company to that much of a legal risk with someone who's been acting "interestingly" recently. I'm not involved in any of this except as a spectator. I don't even use Wordpress. Just saying, I could see why someone might not want to split legal hairs with their leadership right now, even where it's very likely you'd win such an argument in court.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > I'm sure Matt's does, too I wouldn't be so sure. He seems to have gone off the deep end. I know folks, including some successful ones, who legitimately believe that anything that commercially hurts them is illegal, and when a judge sides against them, it's due to bias and not the law. (I don't know if this type of auto-victimisation has a name. You see it parodied by South Park in "The Worldwide Privacy Tour." And, less hilariously, by public figures complaining about their free speech on talk shows and at press conferences they called.)
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      All I know about the recent Matt and WordPress kerfuffle is what I've read here on HN. Based solely on what I've seen of his own comments here on these stories, I think you're right. What I meant in that sentence was "Matt's lawyers do, too", even if Matt might not think so. One time a friend of mine was showing me a bunch of fancy camera gear he'd bought for his wife's ghost hunting business. I pulled him aside and asked him if he really believe in the spirits and apparitions she talked about. He replied, "oh, for tax purposes I completely believe this bullshit." By analogy, even if Matt's lawyers privately agreed that a lawsuit over the meaning of "affiliation" is silly and doomed to lose, I can imagine them replying "oh, for billable hours I completely believe it."
Molitor5901 2y ago
The fact he is using Wordpress.org would seem to be a clear violation of its 501(c)(3) IRS status. If someone has not filed a complaint by now with the IRS perhaps they should. The C3 must be very careful in sharing staff with the for profit entity, and it must be very careful in how they interact.
- robjwells 2y ago
  One of the revelations over the course of this saga was that WordPress.org != WordPress Foundation. It's under the personal control of Matt Mullenweg.
- phonon 2y ago
  Wordpress.org is not part of the 501(c)(3). They tried, but the IRS turned them down. It's Matt's personal toy (staffed by people from Automattic), as far as anyone knows.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    Which is another signal that Matt isn’t serious about the Wordpress Foundation. The correct move would have been to form a for profit subsidiary owned by the foundation to run Wordpress.org since it’s an unrelated business activity. It’s a well trodden path used by tons of nonprofits like the Smithsonian, Mozilla, OpenAI, etc. when they need to operate something that the IRS won’t grant tax exemption.
    - phonon 2y ago
      Well, wordpress.org runs at a large loss...not clear how that could work exactly...
      - throwup238 2y ago
        The Foundation gives its subsidiary money, just like any other parent company can. Whether or not Wordpress.org makes money is irrelevant to its for/non profit status. It’s a legal technicality due to IRS tax exemption rules for unrelated business activities. They have to put those operations into a separate subsidiary, even if it never makes any profit. If the nonprofit can’t afford to run Wordpress.org then the whole nonprofit was a farce anyway.
chiefalchemist 2y ago
I keep repeating this on X: He needs us. We don't need him. Unfortunately, anecdotally, there's a lot of group thinking in WordPress. It's one of the reasons "The WordPress way" is able to run counter to industry best practices. Most people don't know any better, and the handful who do don't speak up. It's a textbook case of toxic kindness. Given the collective actions / behaviors / culture, I've been saying this for close to 10 years: It's not a community. It's a cult.
- lioeters 2y ago
  The other day I was thinking how communities around a programming language or software framework sometimes become toxic subcultures, where its members dogfood the product too much to the point where they can't think outside the box. I guess corporations take advantage of this mechanism of brainwash feedback loop to foster loyal employees who believe in the mission, who can speak the lingo and think in the given conceptual framework, no matter how arbitrary or wrong. It also leads to "big fish in a small pond" syndrome, where people in the inner circle start to think highly of themselves, to look down on the "newbies" and users. They value thier expertise in this niche without realizing its relative poverty and low quality in the larger context. It's a mix of arrogance and ignorance that insulates their ego. I hope the collective disillusionment that WordPress is going through will be healthy for ecosystem in the long run. Let a hundred forks and alternatives bloom!
  - chiefalchemist 2y ago
    That middle paragraph describes exactly my experiences with WordPress and that community. It's mediocrity and blindspots run wild.
- nchmy 2y ago
  oh, indeed. The Wordpress community is overwhelmingly made up of half-wits
froh 2y ago
> Moves like this that destroy your community will eventually usher in a replacement. yes! bitkeeper tried licensing shenanigans and lost to git. smalltalk did licensing shenanigans and lost to Java. Qt almost died and motivated Gnome. In software, inacceptable licensing gives birth to your worst competitor. /s
- ValentineC 2y ago
  WordPress has a huge moat in terms of brand entrenchment. Most business people in companies know what "WordPress" is.
ankleturtle 2y ago
The part which did it in for me was learning that Matt personally owns Wordpress.org. It's not the Foundation. It's not Automattic. It's Matt, personally. Nope, that's a bus factor of one. I'm done.
itronitron 2y ago
If people stop using WordPress, then presumably that will negatively impact WP Engine, which might be the whole point.
1123581321 2y ago
That’s not what affiliation means. This checkbox is similar to T&C that “prevent” competitors from signing up. It’s more about having grounds to bring up WPEngine’s behavior in court if they check the box. It’s understandable you did not realize this, though, and perhaps that chilling effect was intended.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> I wrote an open letter to Matt Mullenweg complaining about the requirement and stating that I believe it violates the Sherman Act and Section 3 of the Clayton Act Send a copy to your state AG [1]. Copy your governor’s office [2] and state representatives if you have the time. [1] https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/ https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/ [2] https://www.usa.gov/state-governor https://www.usa.gov/state-governor
wmeredith 2y ago
"is pretty neat, but it only got that way because thousands of people put millions of hours into building add-ons and hosting services to make it blossom into what it is today." Insert Twitter, Reddit, Digg, MySpace, etc... at the beginning of that quote. The people who own the social networks rarely give a shit about the users once they hit critical mass. And the owners will eventually burn it down or enshitify it beyond recognition.
tony2016 2y ago
Just check No! What are they going to do? Check if you really do not have any kind of affiliation with WPEngine?

baggy_trough 2y ago

https://bullenweg.com https://bullenweg.com is getting spicy.

breakingcups 2y ago
This whole saga is just so bizarre
sgerenser 2y ago
what the heck did I just read?
- docdeek 2y ago
  Pretty sure that is an extract from (one of) public lawsuits brought by former aides to MM’s mother that were employed by MM.
  - ValentineC 2y ago
    Possibly better background, with the lawsuits linked in the post: https://heatherburns.tech/2024/10/14/say-their-names/ https://heatherburns.tech/2024/10/14/say-their-names/
    - nchmy 2y ago
      Saying their names and getting all feely wont help them with their current, quite difficult, financial situation. It should have been launching a crowdsource campaign instead
- doublerabbit 2y ago
  I know, I want my two seconds and mouse click back.
- speed_spread 2y ago
  That was troubling me too, so: from what I understand (someone feel free to correct me if you know better), Mister Wordpress hired people to take care of his ill mother who seems to also have serious mental issues (ref. all the crazy sex talk and racism). One of the caregivers got fed up of the abusive behavior (which wasn't part of the contract) and complained multiple times to Mister Wordpress about it, who then told his mom she should stop making up crazy shit about him and just be a nice person to the people who are trying to help her. Which seems to have made it worse because she's just stark raving mad. Whether there are actual Asian women involved at all remains to be seen (ah) and is beside the point.

nacho2sweet 2y ago

The whole community and ecosystem is full of shady dishonest businesses and practices it seems. Besides all the recent drama as an end user and plugin buyer I have had to ask for 2 separate refunds from major plugins for shady dark pattern re-bills or secret upsells. I used to not consider myself a mark but maybe I am 42 now so I am starting to miss the real opt out buttons (4 pages deep below the fold). Anyways I don't like being in any ecosystem that is full of this stuff and not worth my time to manage all of it.

lxe 2y ago
A very large part of WordPress ecosystem is just incessant upsells for plugins and borderline scams.
ankleturtle 2y ago
If you really want to see the shady, dishonest side, try to have a discussion about nulling plugins. You'll get called every name in the book for adhering to the GPL.
- kyleee 2y ago
  What does nulling plugins mean?
  - ankleturtle 2y ago
    It's the removal of "paywalls" (e.g., license checks, product keys, etc.) in plugins. A lot of developers see this as "stealing" and unethical.

hshshshshsh 2y ago

> I’ve officially left the WordPress project after 14+ years of contributing including: Sorry to be an asshole but this is a good lesson on not to over index your life on a single idea.

pooper 2y ago
Wordpress saga is spicy in itself but really this is also a wake up call for any programmer like me who is overly dependent on a single technology such as dotnet or java. However, what else can we do? There are only so many hours in a day. What reasonable alternative do I have?
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  html doesn't have this issue :)
- jjav 2y ago
  Using only open standards and open source with a suitable license. Being disciplined about this is very difficult, see RMS. But it is the way.
  - odo1242 2y ago
    I mean, Wordpress is open source with a suitable license (GPLv2). You can install plugins from wherever you want. So is every piece of software implicated in this drama, including Advanced Custom Fields (free edition) I really don’t see how the discussion of open source pertains to Wordpress
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- esskay 2y ago
  Sightly different comparing a cms to an entire programming language. A more apt comparison would be your career being entirely focused on Umbraco or OpenCMS rather than dotnet or java.

whalesalad 2y ago

WordPress has been a terrible tool for 10+ years. Good riddance.

TechDebtDevin 2y ago
Not really sure why anyone use WP in 2024 tbh.
- sroerick 2y ago
  What better alternative is there as a webdev? Genuinely looking for answers from a production perspective. Most successful shops I meet or talk to are all-in on Wordpress and I don’t think this drama has affected this calculation. Big Indian SEO + Wordpress firms with American sales teams rule this market. I haven’t done freelance web work in a couple years, but I remember pouring a couple hundred hours into exploring static generators and alternative CMSs just to decide that yeah, Wordpress was probably the cheapest and most user friendly option to.
  - steviedotboston 2y ago
    Drupal is seriously worth another look if you haven't used it in a while. It's really a mature CMS that was completely rewritten a number of years ago. There's also currently an initiative underway to make a new "distro" of Drupal that is more user friendly and less developer focused, which could be great for people coming from WordPress. Drupal does have a learning curve, it doesn't have the robust marketplace of off the shelf themes that WP has, but I love it.
    - sroerick 2y ago
      I struggled with Drupal when I used it. I was responsible for taking over a crowdfunding site which had been built in Drupal and as an intermediate Wordpress and Django developer, I found Drupal’s learning curve insane and it felt like the entire ecosystem was stagnating and dying. There are a lot of Reddit posts that go something like “I took a pay cut to work on a stack other than Drupal and I’ve never been happier”. It’s also the second most hated stack after salesforce. I don’t know if any place where Drupal has been successfully used except for large corporate blogs, which I think it seems well suited for, but I’m happy to be corrected here. It wasn’t for me but I’m glad you like it! If you’re well suited to it I think it’s a great career path.

rtytry 2y ago

Trips me out people made an entire career with WP. My hat is off to them. WP is so hard for me to figure out. It is almost unbelievable that someone would commit their life to that insanity but I respect the hell out of them.

simlevesque 2y ago
I'm not sure what you think is so complex. I started doing plugins and themes for it at 15 years old and I'm no genius.
- AndroTux 2y ago
  It’s not necessarily hard. But it’s cumbersome and just one of the worst codebases I ever had the pleasure of working with. Basically everything about it is legacy, bad design choices, hacks, workarounds and compatibility fixes. That’s what makes it complex. It needs a rewrite 10 years ago. But due to the deep integration of thousands of plugins that will never be possible.
- creativenolo 2y ago
  From personal experience, the complexity comes from how ‘not obvious’, unexpected, or (outwith WordPress) unconventional much of WordPress is. It is a fascinating code base that is a result of it evolving through end user needs, over years, rather than being a grand software architecture with developer ergonomics at the core. Last time I touched it, changing domain names and sync dbs all required plugins. Yet in page editing works like magic. I assume no-one building Wordpress today would build it like it is build.

neiman 2y ago

Isn't every community is like that after so long? Like, I don't like the way that Matt behaved recently, but regarding most of the complains in the post -- these exist in any community or organization which is big enough and has been around for long enough.

gitaarik 2y ago
Yes but the difference here is that Matt has so much influence on the community that he is having a serious negative impact on it.

pier25 2y ago

He migrated his site ot Hugo: https://chriswiegman.com/2024/10/this-site-now-runs-on-hugo/ https://chriswiegman.com/2024/10/this-site-now-runs-on-hugo/ I can understand WP for non-technical users but I'm still amazed at web dev teams still not using static sites for blogs and marketing sites.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
TIPSIO 2y ago
Usually it comes down: - easy client login for template tweaks, uploads, and redirects - forms - extremely minor server-side functionality thing WordPress is perfect for this.
- sroerick 2y ago
  “Extremely minor server-side functionality thing” is where SSGs fail miserably. All of a sudden you’re using SaaS forms or whatever else, or your self hosting some other tremendously inferior CMS and your margins go out the window. Wordpress killer that accomplishes these things you mentioned would interest me. Statamic looks interesting in this context but it wasn’t super well formed 4 years ago when I dug deep into this ecosystem
  - amluto 2y ago
    20 years ago, CGI covered this use case pretty well. I wonder if anyone has tried to make a modern equivalent. Maybe something along the line of a Cloudflare Worker (but using the open source stack) or possibly something minimal and flexible based on WASM or JS that could be invoked from different servers could work.
    - sroerick 2y ago
      CGI / PHP is really not a bad way to work in 2024, even though I was traumatized by PHP in my early days. I’ve only experimented with it though, I think it would be hard to maintain at scale, and I’ve heard there are not insignificant security concerns. It’s a lot easier to hire somebody to maintain a Wordpress install than it is to mess with Apache or PHP. When I figured out that Wordpress literally is executing every piece of PHP every time the site loads it was kind of a “woah” moment for me Interesting idea with the Cloudflare thing

breck 2y ago

I'd like to take this chance to plug my new startup, the Printing Press. It's like WordPress, but instead of digital, it's physical. It requires no servers or computers at all. Just paper, which you can make from naturally growing trees, and ink (I'm not sure how that is made). Your blog will last a long time, like hundreds of years. You can read it while sitting over your poo hole. Visit our worksite and check it out. - Johnny Gutenberg

_fat_santa 2y ago

As a JS/React dev, I had to do some WP work a few years back and the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I found WP itself to be nice to work with but the ecosystem around it is just jarring. In the JS ecosystem if you have an issue then you usually go look it up and someone either recommends a fix or a NPM package to get around the issue you are having. With WP when you tried to figure out an issue it was always endless blogspam with an upsell to a plugin or consulting services in the end. I remember reading so many articles on really basic topics where the author would dance around the solution before finally going "well if you want the real answer, please hire my WP consulting firm and we can take a look". And with plugins I found it very hard to find anything open source or free. Every plugin, no matter how small, always seemed to have it's core features locked behind a "premium" version. Now I get it, plugins take time to develop and people want to be paid for their work but it was just really jarring to go from a community where folks contribute to developing the best solution for something together versus everyone hacking it on their own because they wanted to sell a plugin.

nicce 2y ago
If you wanted to modify some plugins and host the source in GitHub, for example, you were essentially writing your own plugins that modify other plugins to be able to do that.
eXpl0it3r 2y ago
I also only recently learned how much money is flowing in the WordPress "community". You ran into all these commercial plugins and consulting services, because that's what most of the WordPress community is. People having their own company, hosting or maintaining sites for others and on the side developing commercial plugins. To me this begs the question, whether making everything open source and available for free in your own free time or while working at some big corp as is the standard in the JavaScript world, is really the better alternative? At least the WordPress community has found a way to sustain themselves, provide services to tens of thousands of small to big businesses, while the JavaScript community seems to be mostly dependent on big tech to keep the lights on for most services.
- 2y ago

mjrpes 2y ago

I'm planning to go through this recent thread of WordPress alternatives: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fsie1i/top_wordpress_alternatives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1fsie1i/top_word... Any others that people recommend? Will be looking for a basic website platform, blog is secondary, no e-commerce, minimal use of plugins, open source and hostable, where everything can be done in a Web UI with exception maybe of site templates. API would be nice to help with conversion from WordPress.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mpol 2y ago
ClassicPress would be the most painless transition. It is basically WordPress without the block editor. Most plugins and themes are compatible.
0311Ghost 2y ago
I also think Classicpress would make the transition smooth. HTMLy also seems to be similar to what you describe. I've been trying it out with a couple of basic projects, and it seems to be a good option that I don't see many people mentioning.

throwawaymatt 2y ago

> I joined WP Engine in 2018 because it was the one company that really did seem to be honest about who they were. Like every other company they were in it to make money, but unlike every other company they didn’t hide that fact behind abusive language. They didn’t claim I was “family.” They didn’t claim their work was virtuous and therefore somehow “better” than non-WordPress orgs. No, they said they wanted to be the biggest host and went after that with the best pay I saw in the WordPress ecosystem and interesting work on top of it. Well said. Our agency chose WP Engine over 8 years ago because they were hands-down the best managed WordPress hosting provider. It revolutionized our WordPress hosting offerings and allowed stable, mostly headache free growth. Without the WP Engine's platform, and their investments in making WordPress hosting modular and safe we'd still be in the stone ages of dedicated/vps hosting. What kept us as a customer for these 8 years though, has been the quality of support. It can't really be measured, but I've found their support to be unmatched and highly competent over hundreds of interactions. We've grown over 400% with WP Engine and this entire fiasco with Matt blindsided us. Begrudgingly, we're diversifying our hosting allocations to protect against this new threat but we'd be much happier continuing with just WP Engine.

legitster 2y ago

> I’ve watched people pour their lives into giving back only to have it all tossed out because their important work isn’t what Matt wanted people to focus on. It's sentiments like this that really undercut Mullenweg's arguments. "WP Engine didn't contribute to core" when Core was just the preapproved feature list that was important to Automattic. Even if WP Engine wanted to contribute, their work would have just lined Automattic's pockets (hence why he just asked for money in the shakedown).

Trias11 2y ago

Wordpress is like microsoft. If you want to build a honeypot to attract malware and bad scripted traffic quickly - wordpress is the way. Do you need it? There are way better options today.

gitaarik 2y ago
There were always way better options

givan 2y ago

If you would like to go back on using a CMS instead of static generators please take a look at the one I'm building https://vvveb.com https://vvveb.com it shares the same principles of design and architecture simplicity with the freedom of open source.

rsolva 2y ago
Huh, this looks ... really, really good?
- givan 2y ago
  Thank you.
davidcollantes 2y ago
Really, really well done! GitHub starred, and playing with it. Thank you for sharing!
- givan 2y ago
  Thank you.
remram 2y ago
There's a "hero-1" tooltip on my screen when I hover basically anywhere on that landing page, it's a bit distracting.
- givan 2y ago
  Thanks for feedback, I fixed it.

codingclaws 2y ago

I'm reading the WordPress docs right now as an experienced developer that hasn't used WordPress that much. It's kind of interesting. There's a whole REST API built into WordPress. And there's also a full on Node workflow that you can use to develop certain components.

yurishimo 2y ago
At its core, Wordpress is not bad software, it’s just old and shows it’s age sometimes. I’ve worked with a lot of really talented engineers who built their careers on Wordpress. News organizations powering the top breaking stories online run on WP. It’s a competent, mature, and extensible platform for developers, even if the modern marketing is not catered to devs. These days I’ve moved to Laravel but all of my friends in WP world are bummed that their livelihoods are being toyed with by the former BDFL now just DFL.
abhiyerra 2y ago
In a lot of ways it is not different from Rails or Django. Just approaching it from a non-technical market with a ton of plugins. You can in fact add an API and execute PHP or use it as an API Gateway. Definitely been tempted to use it but as others have said to do anything useful requires a ton of plugins that integrate in weird ways and have to pay subscriptions for the useful features. But still I think it is one of the best ways for non-technical people to creating websites quickly.
- kyleee 2y ago
  Yes, interesting comment. It also well predates Laravel (not sure about Rails) and that plus backwards compatibility all the way back to archaic PHP versions explains some of the cruft (but not all of the suboptimal design).

maxbond 2y ago

There are no benevolent dictators. People who are serious about building community will put their trust in others. They will delegate. They will listen to advice. They will compromise. They will be imperfect; they will fail to do the best thing for the community from time to time. But when that happens, more often than not, they will listen and adapt to criticism. We may still call them BDFL. But they aren't truly a dictator. People building petty fiefdoms will inevitably betray the community. When I read about Mullenweg, something I'm struck by is his cry bullying. I see him responding to complaints like, "are you threatening me? I get a lot of death threats." I bet he does get death threats, and to be clear it's not okay that he and other public figures have their lives threatened. But it's common for him to respond to people telling him to go to hell as if they were making an actionable threat. See [0]. I would be upset if someone hoped I "[died] a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere." But I would know they were being hyperbolic and flipping me the bird, not making a threat. (Especially if I was familiar with Tumblr's culture and the texture of humor on the platform. Like you might expect from the CEO.) And I certainly wouldn't respond by doxing them. And this is really important; doxing someone is actually putting them in jeopardy, with no hyperbole. Doxing someone is an actionable threat of harassment. This is a betrayal of the community's trust, and the exercise of power against the community's interests. I've seen some other examples of him mischaracterizing insults (including milder ones than this) as threats, but I wasn't able to find them in my timebox. These were screenshots from Twitter and possibly Slack, presumably I could find them if I had accounts on those platforms. You can also look at the recent controversy as an exercise in cry bullying. "WP Engine is so unfair to the community," he cries. "They deprive people of the essential feature of having more than 3 revisions without changing a setting." Then cuts a large subset of the community off from things that are actually critical, like logging in and updating plugins. He betrayed the community and exercised his leadership position to prosecute his personal quarrels at the community's expense. I apologize if this was a rant, but here's the point. We should be thinking harder about open source governance, because there are no benevolent dictators. Positions of power corrupt, and they also attract the corrupt to them. When BBS operators were powerful in our community, they attracted (at least one) con artist(s) [1]; now we see a BDFL using our community to rule as a petty tyrant. When we want to adopt an up and coming project, we should ask the BDFL what the plan is for turning over power to democratic mechanisms in the community. When a new project starts only 1 or few people are there to make decisions, so a BDFL is the natural state of things. But we should expect governance to become more sophisticated as a project becomes more important. We should learn to recognize the rhetorical mechanism a petty tyrant uses to conflate their interests with the interests of the community. Be suspicious of them. Push back. Ultimately, there are two mechanisms to hold a petty tyrant accountable; forking and rewriting. We should be prepared to do that. Maintainers reading this might say, "oh, great, not only are people going to open up spurious issues and feel entitled to my time, but you're asking them to be a peanut gallery trying to hold me accountable to democratic mechanisms. What a pain in the ass." This is a solid objection which I do not have a good response to. Another objection I don't have an answer to is the very real issues projects like Redis and Elasticache have encountered, where platform giants capture the value without contributing back financially. That's a real problem I'm not smart enough to solve, and it does complicate what I'm suggesting. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-with-trans-user-over-account-ban-revealing-private-account-names-in-the-process/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTzQmhmgLC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTzQmhmgLC0

NationOfJoe 2y ago

People keep saying in this thread, there are better alternatives but i do not see any listed. i know of - Statamic (php, Laravel)- https://statamic.com/ https://statamic.com/ - Strapi (js) - https://strapi.io/ https://strapi.io/ and then a bunch of SaaS platforms. what are the market leading open source CMS's?