5 ms·

WordPress is a very mature project with a long legacy but I'm surprised that there hasn't been a larger profile attempt to make a spiritual successor to it that

by treyd 2y ago

WordPress is a very mature project with a long legacy but I'm surprised that there hasn't been a larger profile attempt to make a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage of being PHP and the long history of vulns that have come along with it. I'm imagining some very pluggable and template driven runtime that you can ship very declarative packages for. The spicy take would be to use a Scheme for the templating around some robust Rust core, but that's probably not the widest appeal. Maybe there would be some clever way to bootstrap it out of PHP so that you can keep using shared PHP hosts and they wouldn't have to bring along a new software distribution.

hombre_fatal 2y ago
It's just a reminder how much "right place at the right time" plays into the phenomenon of ubiquity, from Wordpress to Harry Potter to Zoom to Javascript. There are countless efforts to make the next Wordpress out there, yet no combination of Scheme and Rust is going to make up for the critical missing ingredient of "right place at the right time".
- andrewmcwatters 2y ago
  This is the right time. Strike while the iron is hot. People are angry and concerned. Someone just needs to come forward with an attractive way to capitalize on the situation.
  - hombre_fatal 2y ago
    But the problem is that if Wordpress disappears overnight, you're left with a sea of alternatives that's 100x larger than when Wordpress rose to popularity. Ex-Wordpress users are just going to diffuse into all the other decent options that already exist. Or stick with a Wordpress fork that caters to them. Though note that Wordpress isn't going away. How many Wordpress users even know who Mullenweg is? The idea of cobbling together yet another blog platform that will somehow capture these users better than Wordpress plus all the decent incumbents is some good ol fashioned developer hubris. :P
    - munchler 2y ago
      There are many examples of an entrenched incumbent being displaced by a new killer app. All it takes is the right new features and perhaps a path from the old to the new.
- nottorp 2y ago
  You mean there aren't already 20 unfinished projects reimplementing Wordpress in Rust?
  - treyd 2y ago
    Not yet there aren't. Perhaps we should form a committee to start a few and ensure that none of them actually have thr critical mass go succeed!
    - nottorp 2y ago
      There's no need. Most "rewrite in Rust" projects implement some basic functionality and miss the other 90%, get posted here for self promotion and then get abandoned don't they?
- raverbashing 2y ago
  And honestly WP is a great product. No other CMS managed to get so much community around, so many plugins etc Right timing absolutely, but there was also great product sense there Drupal feels like it's a bureaucrats paradise. Other CMSs never got there neither
greggman7 2y ago
What would replace it? PHP is unique in that it makes sharing a server trivial and low-resource compared to almost every other solution. A simple example might be that you can run 100s of PHP forums on a single machine low memory machine but if you want to use discourse (not written in PHP), it requires 10x 20x the resources for a single forum. This is true about almost every other solution AFAICT.
- andix 2y ago
  That's probably the best explanation. There is no real alternative to PHP if you want to host cheap and simple. It's also really easy to deploy WordPress to a shared hoster, just by uploading a few files via FTP/etc and setting up a MySQL connection. Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?
  - bsimpson 2y ago
    When Wordpress first came up, PHP was something anyone with $5 could administer, and Python/Ruby required a lot more money and expertise that put them outside the reach of junior hobbyists. This was before the days of PaaS solutions like AppEngine.
    - andix 2y ago
      I don't know any PaaS solution that is not at least a magnitude more complex than a simple PHP shared hoster. As much as I hate PHP, the typical LAMP shared hosting is by far the most simple kind of PaaS.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    > Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces? I think I just threw up a little, in my mouth... I don't think there's a viable alternative to PHP. The nerds here, hate it (and they aren't really wrong). I hate it, but it is undisputed God Emperor of Cheap Hosting. There's nothing that even comes close, for simplicity, speed, robustness, cost, and ubiquity. There are millions of pages of support, years of support forums, and hundreds of thousands of people that can work with PHP at an expert level. Despite the hate, PHP is a mature, modern language, still very much under development, and supported by many corporations. Much of the primitive stuff it started with, has been replaced (I think, rather clumsily, but it works). The simplest hosting solutions have LAMP ("P" being "PHP"), and there are millions of LAMP servers out there. Every single one can run WP, simply by uploading a few files, creating a MySQL DB/User, tweaking a config, and Björn Stronginthearm's your uncle. Or, with things like WPE, you can click on a button in your control panel dashboard. Also, non-HN-readers can manage just about every aspect of a WP server, once it's set up. People have made careers from that. This sucks. I run a couple of sites. I use WP, because it means that I don't have to waste much time, managing them. I could definitely switch over to a static generator (what I would use, if I didn't do WP), or even write my own sites, using handcoded HTML (I have done that, and have even written my own CMSes, in The Dark Ages). I just don't want to have to do that. The moment I walk away from WP, I am sealing my own fate. It will make it ten times as hard to push the sites over to someone else to manage. I am an indifferent (at best) Web designer. Almost every person here, could probably code circles around me. That means that working on Web sites is painful and slow, detracting from what I'm actually good at. This sucks.
samuell 2y ago
As I understand, the vulns come because of a big messy codebase and the idea to solve everything with another 3rd party plugin. Processwire OTOH is fantastic in this regard. Super small and generic core with minimal, close to non-existent attack surface, and a programmatic API that lets you solve custom functionality with a few calls to the content API instead of another plugin. Leads to practically maintenance free sites. Almost the security of a static site, with the flexibility and dynamic features of a proper cms. After having the nightmare of maintaining a dozen WP and Drupal sites in the past, I can now just let the sites chug along for years without intervention.
pessimizer 2y ago
> a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage Plenty of people have made better CMSes, Wordpress is big because it got big, and a lot of people depend on it. And since an enormous number of people are involved with it, your upstart system will never have the capability of Wordpress. Whatever capability you come up with, somebody will have already made a horrible module to install on Wordpress to do it that after 10 years has become almost alright, or at least all of the flaws have been posted on messageboards and everybody knows how to work around them. Wordpress isn't wordpress because it's good, it's wordpress because it was good enough at the time, and its competition was Drupal and Joomla (or something not PHP.) PHP baggage? PHP isn't PHP because it's good, it's PHP because of mod_php, and cheap hosts. To repeat, your choices: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or figuring out how to run another language on your cheap host, or having to pay to upgrade your hosting account. By far the best option for most people was Wordpress. If you want to compete with Wordpress, first get a time machine, then go back to that time and write something better in PHP.
- dylan604 2y ago
  meh, if you're gonna cheat with a time machine, then just bring a floppy disc with the various versions of wordpress. as PHP gets updated, just release the newer version of wordpress. it's open source, right?
dageshi 2y ago
Every time I read a comment like this about replacing WP and PHP with a successor it just sounds so incredibly out of touch. I mean no offense OP but it's obvious you have no clue at all about who actually uses WP and why they do it.
- levocardia 2y ago
  Yes, I always see people post comments like "why not just use (some crazy stack of CLI tools, markdown, source control, and CDNs) it's way better for XYZ reason" not realizing that the people behind most WP sites--which constitute something like 25% of the internet--are in general extremely nontechnical people who are posting recipes, sharing knitting patterns, writing travel blogs, archiving family photos, etc., and who have ZERO interest in anything that looks like source code. And I don't blame them! I run wordpress sites and I sigh with frustration any time I have to insert a custom HTML block, and I am technical. When I'm writing on WP I want it simple and easy. WP is also not just a CMS where you can drop in something else. It's a colossal ecosystem of plugins, themes, and so on. Some sites run on entire mini-ecosystems within the WP ecosystem, e.g. generatepress/generateblocks/generatecloud.
- marcolussetti 2y ago
  WordPress is to creating website what Excel is to generic business calculations.
ValentineC 2y ago
> I'm surprised that there hasn't been a larger profile attempt to make a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage of being PHP and the long history of vulns that have come along with it. I imagine that a spiritual successor would have a one-click install in many web hosts, which is all but impossible if not still written in PHP, and then installable through the various turnkey web hosting reseller stacks (e.g. Softaculous). Then, replicating many of the popular plugins, and getting a whole community of contributors onboard who already make their living off WordPress and have little incentive to adopt something with little traction. WordPress isn't a code framework; it's a very complete application with a massive ecosystem of plugins that serves as its moat.
kemayo 2y ago
> shake the baggage of being PHP PHP is why WordPress was a success. PHP is available basically everywhere, for cheap. You can get a $5/month hosting plan that'll give you a VPS with mod_php and mysql and you'll be able to install WordPress. (Also, WordPress put some actual effort into having a quick-and-simple setup process. If you can upload some files onto a server, it can take it from there.) Thus anyone can trivially install WordPress. There's "better" languages, but even today they tend to require more of you to get a working site deployed.
- jopsen 2y ago
  It's actually a bit surprising that no other languages tries to make server pages the way php and asp3 did. Of course the model is flawed, but so easy to get started with :)
nicce 2y ago
There is Ghost at least: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost However, it has recently shifted to more limited audience. (payed subscription-based content with different tiers)
notatoad 2y ago
the baggage is the selling point. there's so many other ways to build a website that aren't wordpress and replicate the core functionality, the reason it sticks around is the huge legacy of plugins written in php that can't be easily replicated.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by treyd 2y ago

hombre_fatal 2y ago

It's just a reminder how much "right place at the right time" plays into the phenomenon of ubiquity, from Wordpress to Harry Potter to Zoom to Javascript. There are countless efforts to make the next Wordpress out there, yet no combination of Scheme and Rust is going to make up for the critical missing ingredient of "right place at the right time".

andrewmcwatters 2y ago
This is the right time. Strike while the iron is hot. People are angry and concerned. Someone just needs to come forward with an attractive way to capitalize on the situation.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  But the problem is that if Wordpress disappears overnight, you're left with a sea of alternatives that's 100x larger than when Wordpress rose to popularity. Ex-Wordpress users are just going to diffuse into all the other decent options that already exist. Or stick with a Wordpress fork that caters to them. Though note that Wordpress isn't going away. How many Wordpress users even know who Mullenweg is? The idea of cobbling together yet another blog platform that will somehow capture these users better than Wordpress plus all the decent incumbents is some good ol fashioned developer hubris. :P
  - munchler 2y ago
    There are many examples of an entrenched incumbent being displaced by a new killer app. All it takes is the right new features and perhaps a path from the old to the new.
nottorp 2y ago
You mean there aren't already 20 unfinished projects reimplementing Wordpress in Rust?
- treyd 2y ago
  Not yet there aren't. Perhaps we should form a committee to start a few and ensure that none of them actually have thr critical mass go succeed!
  - nottorp 2y ago
    There's no need. Most "rewrite in Rust" projects implement some basic functionality and miss the other 90%, get posted here for self promotion and then get abandoned don't they?
raverbashing 2y ago
And honestly WP is a great product. No other CMS managed to get so much community around, so many plugins etc Right timing absolutely, but there was also great product sense there Drupal feels like it's a bureaucrats paradise. Other CMSs never got there neither

greggman7 2y ago

What would replace it? PHP is unique in that it makes sharing a server trivial and low-resource compared to almost every other solution. A simple example might be that you can run 100s of PHP forums on a single machine low memory machine but if you want to use discourse (not written in PHP), it requires 10x 20x the resources for a single forum. This is true about almost every other solution AFAICT.

andix 2y ago
That's probably the best explanation. There is no real alternative to PHP if you want to host cheap and simple. It's also really easy to deploy WordPress to a shared hoster, just by uploading a few files via FTP/etc and setting up a MySQL connection. Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?
- bsimpson 2y ago
  When Wordpress first came up, PHP was something anyone with $5 could administer, and Python/Ruby required a lot more money and expertise that put them outside the reach of junior hobbyists. This was before the days of PaaS solutions like AppEngine.
  - andix 2y ago
    I don't know any PaaS solution that is not at least a magnitude more complex than a simple PHP shared hoster. As much as I hate PHP, the typical LAMP shared hosting is by far the most simple kind of PaaS.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  > Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces? I think I just threw up a little, in my mouth... I don't think there's a viable alternative to PHP. The nerds here, hate it (and they aren't really wrong). I hate it, but it is undisputed God Emperor of Cheap Hosting. There's nothing that even comes close, for simplicity, speed, robustness, cost, and ubiquity. There are millions of pages of support, years of support forums, and hundreds of thousands of people that can work with PHP at an expert level. Despite the hate, PHP is a mature, modern language, still very much under development, and supported by many corporations. Much of the primitive stuff it started with, has been replaced (I think, rather clumsily, but it works). The simplest hosting solutions have LAMP ("P" being "PHP"), and there are millions of LAMP servers out there. Every single one can run WP, simply by uploading a few files, creating a MySQL DB/User, tweaking a config, and Björn Stronginthearm's your uncle. Or, with things like WPE, you can click on a button in your control panel dashboard. Also, non-HN-readers can manage just about every aspect of a WP server, once it's set up. People have made careers from that. This sucks. I run a couple of sites. I use WP, because it means that I don't have to waste much time, managing them. I could definitely switch over to a static generator (what I would use, if I didn't do WP), or even write my own sites, using handcoded HTML (I have done that, and have even written my own CMSes, in The Dark Ages). I just don't want to have to do that. The moment I walk away from WP, I am sealing my own fate. It will make it ten times as hard to push the sites over to someone else to manage. I am an indifferent (at best) Web designer. Almost every person here, could probably code circles around me. That means that working on Web sites is painful and slow, detracting from what I'm actually good at. This sucks.

samuell 2y ago

As I understand, the vulns come because of a big messy codebase and the idea to solve everything with another 3rd party plugin. Processwire OTOH is fantastic in this regard. Super small and generic core with minimal, close to non-existent attack surface, and a programmatic API that lets you solve custom functionality with a few calls to the content API instead of another plugin. Leads to practically maintenance free sites. Almost the security of a static site, with the flexibility and dynamic features of a proper cms. After having the nightmare of maintaining a dozen WP and Drupal sites in the past, I can now just let the sites chug along for years without intervention.

pessimizer 2y ago

> a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage Plenty of people have made better CMSes, Wordpress is big because it got big, and a lot of people depend on it. And since an enormous number of people are involved with it, your upstart system will never have the capability of Wordpress. Whatever capability you come up with, somebody will have already made a horrible module to install on Wordpress to do it that after 10 years has become almost alright, or at least all of the flaws have been posted on messageboards and everybody knows how to work around them. Wordpress isn't wordpress because it's good, it's wordpress because it was good enough at the time, and its competition was Drupal and Joomla (or something not PHP.) PHP baggage? PHP isn't PHP because it's good, it's PHP because of mod_php, and cheap hosts. To repeat, your choices: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or figuring out how to run another language on your cheap host, or having to pay to upgrade your hosting account. By far the best option for most people was Wordpress. If you want to compete with Wordpress, first get a time machine, then go back to that time and write something better in PHP.

dylan604 2y ago
meh, if you're gonna cheat with a time machine, then just bring a floppy disc with the various versions of wordpress. as PHP gets updated, just release the newer version of wordpress. it's open source, right?

dageshi 2y ago

Every time I read a comment like this about replacing WP and PHP with a successor it just sounds so incredibly out of touch. I mean no offense OP but it's obvious you have no clue at all about who actually uses WP and why they do it.

levocardia 2y ago
Yes, I always see people post comments like "why not just use (some crazy stack of CLI tools, markdown, source control, and CDNs) it's way better for XYZ reason" not realizing that the people behind most WP sites--which constitute something like 25% of the internet--are in general extremely nontechnical people who are posting recipes, sharing knitting patterns, writing travel blogs, archiving family photos, etc., and who have ZERO interest in anything that looks like source code. And I don't blame them! I run wordpress sites and I sigh with frustration any time I have to insert a custom HTML block, and I am technical. When I'm writing on WP I want it simple and easy. WP is also not just a CMS where you can drop in something else. It's a colossal ecosystem of plugins, themes, and so on. Some sites run on entire mini-ecosystems within the WP ecosystem, e.g. generatepress/generateblocks/generatecloud.
marcolussetti 2y ago
WordPress is to creating website what Excel is to generic business calculations.

ValentineC 2y ago

> I'm surprised that there hasn't been a larger profile attempt to make a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage of being PHP and the long history of vulns that have come along with it. I imagine that a spiritual successor would have a one-click install in many web hosts, which is all but impossible if not still written in PHP, and then installable through the various turnkey web hosting reseller stacks (e.g. Softaculous). Then, replicating many of the popular plugins, and getting a whole community of contributors onboard who already make their living off WordPress and have little incentive to adopt something with little traction. WordPress isn't a code framework; it's a very complete application with a massive ecosystem of plugins that serves as its moat.

kemayo 2y ago

> shake the baggage of being PHP PHP is why WordPress was a success. PHP is available basically everywhere, for cheap. You can get a $5/month hosting plan that'll give you a VPS with mod_php and mysql and you'll be able to install WordPress. (Also, WordPress put some actual effort into having a quick-and-simple setup process. If you can upload some files onto a server, it can take it from there.) Thus anyone can trivially install WordPress. There's "better" languages, but even today they tend to require more of you to get a working site deployed.

jopsen 2y ago
It's actually a bit surprising that no other languages tries to make server pages the way php and asp3 did. Of course the model is flawed, but so easy to get started with :)

nicce 2y ago

There is Ghost at least: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/ https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost However, it has recently shifted to more limited audience. (payed subscription-based content with different tiers)

notatoad 2y ago

the baggage is the selling point. there's so many other ways to build a website that aren't wordpress and replicate the core functionality, the reason it sticks around is the huge legacy of plugins written in php that can't be easily replicated.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]