15 ms·

Ghost — rethinking WordPress

502 points by saltcod 14y ago

twodayslate 14y ago
Why is all the text a giant image? (That aside, the system looks great)
- johnonolan 14y ago
  Just because it's a rough concept, and I wanted to put it out as quickly as possible rather than delaying by procrastinating about coding a layout. I actually stole got the idea for making it a big page of images from the original .Mail concept page. If there's interest - of course we could put something more professional (and machine readable) together!
  - csomar 14y ago
    I don't think it's justifiable. Lots of people can't read from an image. (For various reasons). I ended up closing the page because the font size is too small.
  - paulsilver 14y ago
    I'd guessed this was to get something out the door quickly. It would be useful if you linked the FAQ image as a mailto to your e-mail address, or just through to your Twitter account. Having to type those out manually is a bit annoying.
  - ckluis 14y ago
    Why not go the roots route? Build a parent theme/theme framework that does everything you want - while maintaining WordPress as its base. This allows you to take advantage of the changes in WordPress overtime - and allows users to switch to a full website if their blog takes off and they turn it into a company/personal website instead of blog. Best of both worlds. I think forking wordpress isn't as good of an idea as building a product which changes wordpress but still leaves everything in tact if someone wants to switch without requiring complex importing/exporting.
  - calinet6 14y ago
    Yeah, my retina display gave you away. Looked pretty bad. This isn't a dig on your images or design (I really liked the ideas and design for sure)—but out of curiosity, do you find image layout easier or more difficult than CSS? I ask because if I wanted to build something like this, I'd go straight for HTML/CSS not because it's proper but because it would be faster and easier.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - lloeki 14y ago
      > Yeah, my retina display gave you away. Well my non-retina MacBook display gave it away too. I don't know if it's the original font or the rasterization, but the body font antialiasing looks poor, or at least uncanny compared to the native one.
  - objclxt 14y ago
    It really put me off. It's not about making it machine-readable, it's about making it human readable for the sizeable number of people who are visually impaired, prefer or need to read in large print, are on high DPI devices, or even copy/paste. It's a massive, huge step backwards. I can't even search the page. I wanted to try and read all of it, but I gave up. I understand that it's quick and dirty, but I don't really think you should throw something out for comment when you can't even copy/paste from the source.
    - leeb 14y ago
      Just came to comment on the lack of accessibility for this page - thank you for pointing it out to the author. If you insist on using images instead of actual text, at LEAST add alt-text of the content to the images! Then the page would be screen-reader accessible.
    - MBCook 14y ago
      It's a terrible mistake. I can't read the site on my iPhone. I can't double tap to fit the text to the screen, it fits the image. If I zoom in, the text looks hazy since its not being re-rendered. Why would anyone do that?
  - SquareWheel 14y ago
    I kept trying to select the text (when I scroll that's how I keep my place on the page). You probably don't need to re-do this page, but consider a text option in the future.
- juan_juarez 14y ago
  Why did you have to point that out? I quickly transitioned from "ho-hum" to "must kill".
nex_ 14y ago
I like it but please drop "apple" stuff screenshot.
- TobbenTM 14y ago
  Yeah, the whole thing felt like an Apple keynote in text. "One more thing:"
krogsgard 14y ago
These are some beautiful concepts by John. However, I think it's also worth noting that just about everyone that works with WordPress wants to see the interface itself be simplified, even if most of us want to retain its flexibility as a CMS. Here are some related notes from Matt Mullenweg on a "radically simplified WordPress" http://ma.tt/2012/05/simpler/ http://ma.tt/2012/05/simpler/ I'd like to see something like Ghost as a step two of Matt's thoughts, rather than a fork or separate project.
- JamesSL 14y ago
  At this stage I think a fork is needed, the work needed to change the core, the people behind WordPress just won't get behind.
  - calinet6 14y ago
    Stop calling it a fork—it needs a radically different core. So start over from the ground up! It needs to be a new project, not a fork.
  - krogsgard 14y ago
    Unrealistic for software that powers over 20% of all new websites. Also, a bit presumptuous of the core team. I think there is a lot of support for a simplified UI (see Matt's post above). Just because there is a barrier before you get patches submitted doesn't make the core team unwilling. Each decision needs fleshing out before getting put into a new version of WP. If it wasn't that way, the project would be a (total) mess.
    - JamesSL 14y ago
      Its WordPress' support for older versions and depreciated plugins which is of the bigger issues.
      - nacin 14y ago
        Our commitment to backwards compatibility simply forces us to make smarter, more deliberate decisions. Because we talk so much about our back compat efforts, it is certainly understandable that people might think that is where almost all of our development effort goes. But that isn't actually the case. We heavily emphasize our philosophies because it makes adopting and updating WordPress easier, and we want users to know that. But in practice, the way we build software doesn't hamstring us. We've introduced new features and rewritten entire APIs without needlessly breaking plugins or sites. And we do sometimes drop stuff -- we are just careful about it. We do whatever is necessary to make WordPress evolve. In the end, we've simply become really good at following through.
ck2 14y ago
The whole page is images, and it's a non-existent product, it's just a theory/proposal. Buried in the text is it would be a fork of wordpress. Net is filled with that sentiment, but it never takes off: http://www.google.com/search?q=fork+wordpress&tbo=1&prmdo=1 http://www.google.com/search?q=fork+wordpress&tbo=1&... If you want to replace wordpress you need a modern rewrite, not a fork. The #1 problem of wordpress (among many) is it loads every darn thing on every darn page and it's now a godzilla of a program so it's becoming a huge nightmare. A cache miss in WordPress on a busy server is a horrible, horrible thing. You cannot escape that problem by a fork.
- calinet6 14y ago
  This would absolutely be better solved by an entirely new application, written from the ground up. And the whole-page-is-images thing really bothered me too. Some nice designs and interesting ideas for sure, and knowing CSS isn't a prerequisite for being a designer, but damn, I have some doubts about the understanding of the technologies here. Which is probably exactly where the concept of "forking Wordpress" came from—a misunderstanding of exactly what that would entail. Modern rewrite is what's needed, definitely. But don't call it anything related to Wordpress. Don't need to.
  - johnonolan 14y ago
    I've been committing code to the core WordPress codebase for 3 years, so while I'm not a PHP developer - I have some idea. Perhaps one thing overlooked in the argument for fork vs new build is that there aren't a huge number of developers with the skills to make this happen who would do it entirely on an Open Source contribution basis as opposed to, say, a startup basis. Appealing to existing WordPress developers, businesses and users, as well as cutting down time to ship first working concept, are (in my mind) some important arguments in favour of a fork.
    - tsewlliw 14y ago
      I'm relatively new to the WP scene, and already its totally clear that WordPress is tolerated because it has a vibrant ecosystem. Getting to keep that is way bigger factor in uptake over the next five years than anything a rewrite could deliver.
mars 14y ago
"wordpress is awesome"... NOT
- mokash 14y ago
  A well written argument with plenty of valid points. I'm just going to stop using Wordpress now.
  - mars 14y ago
    i don't think it's the right place to go into detail here, but there are so many things which make wordpress NOT awesome, that i cannot take anyone seriously who states that wordpress IS awesome. architecture, performance, wordpress's code itself, templating, continious security issues just to name a few.
    - mmishra 14y ago
      Is there any alternative ? I guess there platform is very generic that is why there are 1000s of themes. I was able to build up http://syncfin.com http://syncfin.com in less than a month using wordpress and with an awesome theme. I believe it is a great platform but would like to know if there is any alternative ? I am not looking for RoR or DJango for just a simple blogging needs until there is some significant performance improvement prrof.
timmyd 14y ago
It's a super interesting concept because I think more sites are using wordpress as a CMS and the custom skinning for wordpress sites has a spanned a new industry in itself. As a site note: super +1 for the very last comment, made me laugh. "i hate it/hate you/hate everything - Noted. Haters gonna hate."
timdorr 14y ago
So, this is basically Ghost:Wordpress::Firefox:Mozilla.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
SparrowOS 14y ago
http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25925 http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25925 India-nigger in denial on God. What do You think of Ghandi, God? God says... weaken lost IT Cross suspense Bear If dry naked storing force journey sold vail Paulus Glad roared fatness afterwards Ostia divine recovering creation respected yield offerings cleansed emerging familiar clasp ABOUT alloy delight suggestion countenance descend remember VI Exodus deserve http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=/watch%3Fv%3DpfoR2w61LdE http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=/watch%3Fv%3DpfoR... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1YcNT-v2ik http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1YcNT-v2ik ---- God knows what you're going to think like an old couple completing each other's sentences. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts%202&version=NIV http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts%202&ver... God says... 7:24 Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: 7:25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. 7:26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: 7:27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it. 7:28 And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine: 7:29 For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. 8:1 When he was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him. ---- These are like ink blots or cloud animal shapes. God says... hast bends containing inflicted difficult Though ---- Saw robot video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-KxjVlaLBmk# https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...! God says... was glad. 8:16 The Jews had light, and gladness, and joy, and honour. 8:17 And in every province, and in every city, whithersoever the king's commandment and his decree came, the Jews had joy and gladness, a feast and a good day. And many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them. 9:1 Now in the twelfth month, that is, the month Adar, on the thirteenth day of the same, when the king's commandment and his decree drew near to be put in execution, in the day that the enemies of the Jews hoped to have power over them, (though it was turned to the contrary, that the Jews had rule over them that hated them;) 9:2 The Jews gathered themselves together in their cities throughout all the provinces of the king Ahasuerus, to lay hand on such as sought their hurt: and no man could withstand them; for the fear of them fell upon all people. ---- An "Adder" is a logic circuit. "hazardous"? ---- God says... effort fools orbs resolved ointments diversely ipod Giver bed hairs discomfort Catastrophic_Success ingrated calls congratulation missing joking disentangle thyself turned evermore Michael behind crowned Animals hesitate words materials fit strangely don't_worry reclaiming opinion Orestes rocks downer resisteth curb hot subsists bodies achieve enigma moderation excepted stars houseless ranged fig unpraised righteous it wallow students indued ungodly giant tale PARTICULAR morrow afterward procured events darkness abstinence yea irons Thefts Turn story millennium begged text fields staggered magnified drives people's free goest rob editions certain dully suffrages veiled Kazakhstan ---- Hot iron manipulation with robot fingers is exciting. You like this, God? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBfygUiS50g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBfygUiS50g God says... 5:9 And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him; 5:10 Called of God an high priest after the order of Melchisedec. 5:11 Of whom we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered, seeing ye are dull of hearing. 5:12 For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. 5:13 For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. 5:14 But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. ---- Radio is talking about storm disruption. You wanna appologize to anybody, God, accidental victims? You said after Katrina, "Suffering simplifies life" from Chuck Swindol's Wisdom for the Way. God says... shall they come in unto you: for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods: Solomon clave unto these in love. 11:3 And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart. 11:4 For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father. 11:5 For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites. 11:6 And Solomon did evil in the sight of the LORD, and went not fully after the LORD, as did David his father. 11:7 Then did Solomon build an high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon. ---- God says... meditations sighs deception bitter unchangeable oratory wove seeth I'm_not_dead_yet choler unlimited tempts mirth intercourse tempers sufferedst fantasies plucked community contemplating wherefore Kazakhstan I_could_be_wrong finish slipped Corrected dissoluteness unlike ---- My heart not right? Fuck New York, they surely deserved it, if God schmacked them. I'm on God's side. God says... 2:15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. 2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: 2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. 2:18 And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. 2:19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 2:20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. ---- The big apple. ROFLMAO. I wuv God. Where would You claim residency, God, for voting? God says... Paul the prisoner called me unto him, and prayed me to bring this young man unto thee, who hath something to say unto thee. 23:19 Then the chief captain took him by the hand, and went with him aside privately, and asked him, What is that thou hast to tell me? 23:20 And he said, The Jews have agreed to desire thee that thou wouldest bring down Paul to morrow into the council, as though they would enquire somewhat of him more perfectly. 23:21 But do not thou yield unto them: for there lie in wait for him of them more than forty men, which have bound themselves with an oath, that they will neither eat nor drink till they have killed him: and now are they ready, looking for a promise from thee. 23:22 So the chief captain then let the young man depart, and charged him, See thou tell no man that thou hast shewed these things to me. 23:23 And he called unto him two centurions, saying, Make ready two hundred soldiers to go to Caesarea, and horsemen threescore and ten, and spearmen two hundred, at the third hour of the night; 23:24 And provide them beasts, that they may set Paul on, and bring him safe unto Felix the governor. ---- God says... tolerated don't_count_on_it catch Knock_you_upside_the_head sorrowfulness states private rolling wherefore princes covenanted readers Notwithstanding withdrawing explain profited Unity fictions execrable enquired personally truer ruminating paid sealed cultivated lashest mass Maker suggests oh_come_on shameful sickly inebriate lovest strengthenedst openeth nominally seducing evening than contests plenteous I_love_you richer reject shamelessness distract You generation what_do_you_want wilderness See cause conjecture encouraging truly furnished promised concludeth softening shunning amiable steered encompass //gutenberg cellars ---- I have to explain the passage--Paul claimed to be a Roman Citizen. Interpretation would be a joke about citizenship.
import 14y ago
Forking WP is not a solution (maybe bad). If you want to make a revolution write a blog app from scratch.
mseebach 14y ago
"People often say that WordPress is free as in speech, not as in beer" Do they? What do they mean? Can't you download the full, working source code of Wordpress anymore?
- johnonolan 14y ago
  http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
  - mseebach 14y ago
    Yes? That page says that GPL'd software is free software. WordPress is GPL'd. TFA seems to imply there's something unfree about WP, I'm trying to find out what it means by that.
- qeorge 14y ago
  The author has the saying backwards. WP is free as in beer (you don't pay for it) but not as in speech (you can't do whatever you want with it because of the GPL).
  - mseebach 14y ago
    It can't be that. He wants to fork WP, so the resulting software would also be GPL.
- stan_rogers 14y ago
  The point, if I understand correctly, is that WP is libre and nominally gratis, but it has become so complicated (and resource-heavy) since its conception as a blogging platform that it often costs real money to get it up and running satisfactorily. And there is a certain truth to that; it has, to an extent, become consultantware at industry scale, and often forces even "lightweight" personal sites onto more expensive hosting plans due to file loads, database hits and memory usage. There are "standard" plugins that can help a lot, but that's pretty much opaque to the typical non-technical end user, and it takes more than a passing knowledge of, say, HTML+CSS to style/theme a WP site. Free themes, which a user will often turn to after giving up on the idea of learning to write their own theme are often multiply base64-encoded (and just as often are ad-plagued and/or malware-harboring), and after being bitten once or twice, people resort to paying for themes or to have themes created for them. Not much, perhaps, but more than the "free" (gratis) software they thought they were buying into.
HyprMusic 14y ago
There's a little bit of contradiction in your desires: you say you want to keep "exactly the same theme and plug-in structure" but you also want to limit backwards compatibility. You also say you want to remove bloat and non-core features yet you want to bundle a load of questionable plug-ins. The nicer interface and UI would be welcomed, but I think if you start going too far you'll detract away from Wordpress's core appeal. Don't forget there are many alternatives to Wordpress that have more features built-in, but Wordpress has succeeded because it's simple, flexible and easy.
whalesalad 14y ago
For those of you who might want to follow the dude on Twitter, but tried to copy/paste his username and realized it was an image: http://twitter.com/johnonolan http://twitter.com/johnonolan John makes some great points, which is why I'd like to follow him and see the progression of this. One of us (or a few of us) are going to need to just get down-n-dirty and start building it. The internet is indeed filled with a lot of sentiment for rebuilding WordPress. Most of us who've worked with WP a long time (since b2) have considered it (myself included). I'd love to roll out of bed one morning and press a red LAUNCH button that releases a fresh new fork of WordPress to the world that's compatible with most of it's theme/plugin ecosystem.
EnderMB 14y ago
I'd almost like to see it go the other way. WordPress is a good blog, but a poor CMS choice for anything but the most basic of websites. I reckon the "66%" that use WordPress use it for personal sites or very small business sites (1-10 visitors a day) on shared hosting. There are huge sites using it, but they seem to be the exception that proves the rule. I cannot see why people use WordPress over the likes of Concrete5 or a full CMS on any other platform outside of WordPress being accessible for entry-level developers. For this reason, a full rewrite of WordPress to be solely a basic CMS would probably have these novice developers flock to the system, allowing WordPress to scale back down to doing what it does best.
- gabemart 14y ago
  >I cannot see why people use WordPress over the likes of Concrete5 or a full CMS on any other platform outside of WordPress being accessible for entry-level developers. I run a very modestly profitable website that gets about 1k visitors per day. I'm not even an "entry-level developer", I'm not a developer at all, with only the most rudimentary ability to kludge together a little JS and php. I chose Wordpress for the site, even though it's not a blog. In fact, creating a system where posts weren't displayed in chronological order actually took a few hours of blindly hacking at various WP functions. The reasons I chose Wordpress over an existing CMS: * I already know how to use WP * There is a vast array of FLOSS themes and plugins to meet virtually any need available * Wordpress is well supported by shared hosting and managed VPS providers (through cpanel etc.) * It's relatively easy to get free high-level support through IRC because so many people know WP Most of these reasons are inertia based. It would be a vast undertaking to create a CMS version of Wordpress that actually gained traction because, awkward as WP is, it has an enormous library of free existing solutions to take on virtually any problem. This quality, which the author of the article complains about, it the same reason WP would be so hard to kill. Even if your product is better for a given purpose, people aren't going to give up the advantages of WP I outlined above just for an incremental improvement in UX or speed.
- photomatt 14y ago
  Because it's easy to develop for, can scale to be one of the top ten sites on the internet, and your users won't need training to use it. Now I'll be the first to tell people there are certain things that you should build from scratch, but the examples of what people build with WordPress can be pretty breathtaking even to me: http://wordpress.org/showcase/ http://wordpress.org/showcase/
dave1010uk 14y ago
As someone who makes WordPress sites almost 8 hours a day, what would be the best start is a rewrite of the WordPress core on a popular, modern framework (my vote would be Symfony2). This would bring a breath of fresh air to coding for WordPress. Ideally much of the API would be similar too.
- ivanbernat 14y ago
  However, OP says WP is over 3mb. Including any popular PHP framework means adding a lot of weight in the start (take CakePHP for example).
- rmccue 14y ago
  One of the things we're looking at moving forward is using things like this. We're taking a look at various frameworks at the moment as we look to move forward on a few issues (such as request variable abstraction, for which we're looking at Symfony's HttpFoundation/HttpKernel). However, WordPress still supports PHP 5.2, whereas most frameworks are now 5.3+. There's still a huge [1] userbase still on 5.2, so dropping it isn't really possible at this point in time. [1]: http://wordpress.org/about/stats/ http://wordpress.org/about/stats/
tibbon 14y ago
This proposal makes many good points. If I were rewriting Wordpress, here's what I'd think of: - Seriously consider redesigning the logical layout of the software. Some sort of rough MVC-ish pattern would be a huge improvement over the 'loop' in Wordpress which is almost impossible to deal with. - I personally dislike PHP, but I do see its benefits in deployment. - Make it easy to make beautiful typographic layouts. There's a reason this 1-page wasn't done in Wordpress itself; it is almost impossible to make 'hand-crafted-web' looks in Wordpress without deep CSS and HTML diving. Great blog post layouts shouldn't be that hard. Not all content is the same.
- wmeredith 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure the, 'hand-crafted-web' look is going to require deep CSS and HTML diving anyway you slice it.
  - tibbon 14y ago
    True. Perhaps a Wordpress varient would allow for per-post CSS files. I haven't touched WP in a few years; does it have the equivalent of the Rails Asset Pipeline yet?
    - wmeredith 14y ago
      I don't know much of anything about Rails. As for the per-post CSS files it would be easy to do with a Posts custom field. You could take text input (CSS) and spit it out in the header using a basic query on the current post.
      - jtallant 14y ago
        Splitting everything up like that also makes it a lot of fun when you want to redesign your site ;-)
    - photomatt 14y ago
      It's old but it still works fine, check out the Art Direction plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/art-direction/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/art-direction/
kmfrk 14y ago
Note to the author: if you throw those images into ImageOptim, you can save at least 15%. Probably convenient when you get hit by HN - and don't seem to be hosting images on S3. http://imageoptim.com/ http://imageoptim.com/
- JimWestergren 14y ago
  I prefer Yahoo! YSlow Smush.it [1] which does this for you online. [1] http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/ http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/
  - anatoli 14y ago
    ImageOptim can be configured to reduce the size by a lot more than any of the online tools will. If you're on a Mac, there's no reason to use anything other than ImageOptim and ImageAlpha[1]. [1] http://pngmini.com http://pngmini.com
    - kmfrk 14y ago
      Wow. Never knew about ImageAlpha. Thanks for the link.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
JimWestergren 14y ago
What is needed is a rewrite and not a fork. But why Open Source? Such a proper rewrite is a big undertaking and I don't see how that could be pulled off without financial compensation. Why not offer it for let's say $19 per domain? I would easily pay for it and I am sure many others. This way you could at least pay salaries to developers working on it.
- lachlanj 14y ago
  Jim, this idea (private and pay per domain) is already done extremely well by squarespace.com
avolcano 14y ago
Have to say, the most intriguing ideas I saw in the concept were the two "split view" concepts - one for managing blog posts, and one for writing posts. Has any blogging platform implemented anything like that? I know there are Markdown editors with a split view, but I don't know of any that are web-based, nor any that are integrated into existing blogging platforms. And I've definitely never seen any "manage/edit old posts" system as clean and simple as the one in the concept. Oh, and btw, a brilliant concept that's super easy to miss - being able to type "(image)" in the editor pane and seeing an image upload placeholder in the preview pane. It's a small thing, but one of those things that seems way more obvious than it actually is.
- rada 14y ago
  There is aero snap. There are browser extensions. You can easily have your split view today, for any website, without re-writing anything. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn97WbalJwM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn97WbalJwM http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/features/snap http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/feature... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fox-splitter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fox-splitter/
- thenomad 14y ago
  The aged Rails blogging app Typo did this, and it was very useful.
- nwienert 14y ago
  Obtvse did: https://github.com/natew/obtvse/tree/refresh https://github.com/natew/obtvse/tree/refresh http://cl.ly/image/0m3d3k230b47 http://cl.ly/image/0m3d3k230b47 It keeps position as you scroll and write.
- tripzilch 14y ago
  From an aesthetic point of view, I'd really want the Markdown code to be more visually distinct from the preview. I'd love something like the "Oblivion" colours in gedit for instance, although I am aware that opinions differ on dark backgrounds :) It would give a nice visual distinction though, like the old "underwater" mode in WordPerfect.
kijin 14y ago
> Less Options ... there are still too many options, too many settings, too many things which you have an unnecessary level of control over in the administrative user interface ... Things that many people have never even used. Ghost would get rid of all that. And you hope to captivate the hearts and minds of the open-source developer community? Haven't you seen what happened with earlier versions of GNOME 3 and Unity? We love options. We love settings. We don't want them gone, we just want them neatly organized and tucked away in an inconspicuous corner so that we can tweak them at lunchtime. You yourself might have never used an obscure feature, such as posting by e-mail, but other people do use it every day, and will never switch unless they can keep using it. In fact, there exists an entire blogging platform (Posterous) that is based on the premise of posting by e-mail. Even my grandfather, who is utterly lost when it comes to regular blogging, can use Posterous because he knows how to send e-mail. Since Posterous is now on life support, I've been considering migrating him to one or another WordPress platform, precisely because WordPress supports posting by e-mail. If your fork removes this feature, it will fall right off my radar. I'm sure that somebody else will be able to tell a similar story regarding any WordPress feature that you think is unnecessary or unrelated to blogging. For example, "No Comments": excellent, now I need to send all my visitors to a third party who specializes in tracking them across the world wide web. Someone who had a blog about online privacy might consider it a case of hypocrisy. It's easy to drop options and features that you don't see yourself using as part of "blogging". Anyone can do it, and each person who tries will get a product that fits his or her definition of "blogging". Such products, however, won't gain widespread use like WordPress has. A much more difficult but potentially rewarding task is to reorganize options and features so that casual users get sane defaults and power users can tweak to their heart's content. It takes a lot of careful thinking, planning, asking around, and UX experience to get this right, but once you do get it right, the difference can be stunning. As the saying goes, 80% of people only use 20% of features, but each person uses a different 20%. One solution would be to organize these "extra" features into easily installable plugins, and to have those plugins ready before you sign off on your first official release. That would prevent the kind of negative publicity that surrounded the premature releases of some Linux interfaces. But another section of your write-up gives the impression that you don't want that many plugins, either. PS: But you should definitely kill the ability to edit themes using the web interface. It's a security nightmare, leaving so many critical files writable by the web server. Also, the split view looks wonderful.
geekfactor 14y ago
I'd like to see a fork Ghost as a Rails app. Anyone game?
- JamesSL 14y ago
  Will be all over this should things go ahead.
- cheald 14y ago
  The problem is that Wordpress is vehemently anti-MVC, and its plugin structure depends on this. You'd have to design an entirely different system to work on Rails.
- startupnerd 14y ago
  keen to learn rails - maybe Ghost will be a fun little project
- nir 14y ago
  You know, IIRC the first Rails demo actually used building a blog app as example. 8 years later and still no one has come up with a real Wordpress/Drupal/Mediawiki alternative - or at least none that's gained any significant userbase. I often wonder why..
alphex 14y ago
This is a problem being answered with a half dozen other projects. (I'm, admittedly a drupal guy. But I even know whats wrong with Drupal...) Symfony, as a core framework for CMS's gives an amazing bedrock to build exactly what you're talking about. ... Just as an example of something else that exists that is working forward towards exactly what you're wanting to build, you should check out Apostrophe, http://apostrophenow.org/ http://apostrophenow.org/ And then theres the 90 other projects that exist on 90 other languages... But yeah, don't fork Wordpress, make something better.
lionhearted 14y ago
Very cool. Any thoughts on going the other direction -- the dedicated CMS way?
- notatoad 14y ago
  There are plenty of dedicated CMS. The last thing we need is another one. Although I suppose you could say the same thing about blogging platforms.
taylorbuley 14y ago
Very interesting ideas here, for me particulary in the "free as in Mozilla, not as in Automattic" angle. Some might consider it blasphemy to say Auttomattic and WordPress have divergent goals so I'm glad people are having the discussion. All that said, I'm not sure I want a CMS from someone who uses images for text instead of actual text http://john.onolan.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/81.png http://john.onolan.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/81.png
- uglyclown 14y ago
  ^ This. The author of the page has obviously no idea what he's talking about.
EwanToo 14y ago
Personally, and I know this is a ridiculous dream, I'd rather see a clone of Wordpress functionality which maintained 95%+ plugin compatibility, but which had things like caching built-in (and just more sensible handing of files and databases in general).
rglover 14y ago
So is the argument to improve the visuals of WP, it's functionality, or both? If I'm grabbing the thesis statement properly, it sounds like the idea is to make WP more flexible as a CMS. If so, that'd be very handy. I'm not sure how it would work logistically, but it'd be cool if admins could flip a switch (maybe in wp-config) that makes a site either "blog" mode or "CMS" mode. Sort of like what you have to do to make a site networked (i.e. multiple blogs same domain). I like John's ideas here, and this is something that should be talked about. If John has ties back to WP, though, I would present the ideas and make a case for letting him head up design or experience. The forking thing could get way out of hand (and confuse a lot of people). Short of that, I'd say take the Ghost name and start building your own platform. It'd be cool to see another open competitor to WP. Especially if it shared a lot of the same principles.
zacharyvoase 14y ago
> Ghost would be developed openly, and it would encourage contribution. Until > now, Open Source projects have often had an incredibly high barier [sic] to > entry for contribution, which is so complicated and convoluted that only > advanced-level developers have ever really had a hope of getting involved. > Ghost would facilitate open and easy contribution from people with different > skillsets to help grow and evolve the platform. Because designers and > developers working together to solve problems always produces a better end > result. N.B.: I'm talking from my experience with other open-source projects; I haven't worked with Wordpress before but I think there are some generalizations here that need addressing. I disagree that there's an ‘incredibly’ high barrier to entry with many FLOSS projects, over and above the technical ability to read and understand what's happening in the code (which cannot be made up for through community efforts, or indeed forking). The language used in this passage presents these issues as manufactured or intended, and therefore as problems that can be fixed by simply making different decisions. But they're fundamentally issues of community, and of time/attention management on the part of the core developers, and they require extraordinary patience. It's very easy to say "get designers and developers working together". But, as I've seen with DevOps (which is the principle of "developers and operations working together"), the phrase "working together" is often used without any understanding of its meaning. I don't want to come across as a naysayer. But seriously, if you have the answers to the problems presented here, a lot of people would love to know.
photomatt 14y ago
I really like some of the things John has done in his mockups here, especially on the write screen, and contrary to what he thinks ideas like this are more than welcome in the WordPress community. (For example check out the dramatically revamped media or the dozens of eliminated options in trunk right now.) The one big mistake in his premise, however, is that only 34% of WordPress users are blogging, the actual percentage is much higher. The survey he quotes me talking about was of mostly people who make their living building WordPress sites (over 20,000) and mostly WordPress.org users. This community naturally focuses (and contributes) more on the CMS and application framework side of WordPress. On WordPress.com, however, the vast majority of its millions of users blog, and are blogging more every day. If you visit WP.com you will see a simplified and streamlined user experience that is boldly different from the traditional wp-admin dashboard. Already we've seen huge boosts in user engagement from this new experience, and while it's a few dozen iterations from being ready I'm confident the best concepts will make their way back into WordPress core when they are ready. But overall, I love seeing different people's takes on what the next generation of WordPress will look like, and I wish more people did blog posts like this. We've had 3 dramatic shifts in our evolution before, and the shape the next one will take is a topic that occupies most of my waking hours, mind space, and creativity. And don't even get me started on mobile... :)
- gozmike 14y ago
  Is it safe to say that without a vastly improved mobile experience WordPress is in serious trouble? As a huge fan of the WordPress community and what the software and platform has empowered, I'm seeing a decreasing amount of interest in blogging as my social network turns toward meme-sharing and 140-character quips simply because they're much more conducive to consumption and sharing on mobile. It's so bad that there are startups trying to fix this like Blogstand (http://blogstand.co http://blogstand.co - our project). We know that others are attempting the same (and they should be!)
  - photomatt 14y ago
    > Is it safe to say that without a vastly improved mobile experience WordPress is in serious trouble? I would 100% agree with that.
dylanhassinger 14y ago
I love this, except for the part about building popular plugins into the core. That sounds like a path to more feature bloat. Instead, what if there were a small set of plugins that were "Recommended by Ghost". They could be lightweight and specially geared for extending Ghost. But still totally optional. (sort of like Jetpack I guess)
wolfparade 14y ago
build this on top of jekyll or its a fail.
- agius 14y ago
  Developer of https://jekyllhub.com https://jekyllhub.com here. I think Jekyll might be over-complicated for what Ghost is going for. WordPress and the hypothetical Ghost seem to target the mass-market; Jekyll is mostly about power features. Easy integration with git via the filesystem, code highlighting with pygments, configuration with yaml... most people really wouldn't care about that kind of stuff.
skeltoac 14y ago
johnonolan I agree with the sentiment that got you there, but not with where you went. Because if you're just going to fork WordPress anyway, all you really need to do is replace the wp-admin theme. Yeah, I said wp-admin theme. It's not generally considered a theme but that's what it is: the core-provided view of everything you can touch when you're an admin. Try thinking of the back end the same way you think of a front-end theme. Unfortunately WordPress has not yet devoted a development cycle to making the entire admin area easily pluggable. Any seasoned WordPress developer could hack together a plugin that hijacks wp-admin URLs and displays its own interface. Several have. Wouldn't that satisfy your requirements? Of course none of that addresses the issues around efficiency and performance. My hope is that WordPress will finally undergo a deep refactoring to remove its worst practices even if it means forcing updates to popular plugins and themes. There is no longer a reason to fear mass defection from the community for pulling that trigger. After the initial shock the changes would be embraced and everyone would enjoy better performance.
iuguy 14y ago
It looks really nice and I'd look into it if it existed, but it doesn't. Is there some sort of trend rising in putting mockups of vapourware? I really like the split screen and markdown support. That would definitely get my interest. But please, ship 0.1 and let us know, don't tease us with vapourware.
hippich 14y ago
I guess it will cost me some karma, but... Yes! Please do it. And put large text saying "This is blogging platform. Please DO NOT build your next e-commerce site using this software." :)
sergiotapia 14y ago
I'd love for a blogging platform that let me use custom CSS, Markdown (because I post code all the time on my blog) and free hosting. Where is something like that? Wordpress, atrocious code support. Jekyll, too much configuration. I don't want to learn Jekyll I just want to post code. Where is the middle ground for people like me? Sounds like this hypothetical "Ghost" is just what I'm looking for. Now if someone could build it...
- cooperadymas 14y ago
  I recommend http://getkirby.com/ http://getkirby.com/ (Not affiliated, but a fan.) It's worth the $39, but you can try it on a non-public site before you buy. It's incredibly simple, powered by plain text markdown files, easy to extend, and there is a "Panel" plugin that gives a very basic backend. Very little setup since it runs on PHP and without a true database. You can also connect it with Dropbox if you have the server permissions, to make editing files even easier.
- agius 14y ago
  Hey - I'm making a thing called https://jekyllhub.com https://jekyllhub.com - it's designed to take the pain our of Jekyll and get you blogging quickly and easily. I'd love to get your feedback on it. If you send me your email, I can make you a free lifetime account: andrew@atevans.com Cheers!
- davewasthere 14y ago
  Github pages and prose.io would do the trick for you then. I really like Ghost, but as a front-end to a github-pages/Jekyll powered blog. It'd be exactly what I'm after.
  - sergiotapia 14y ago
    I've tried Github Pages, not intuitive AT ALL, terrible user experience. I'll look into prose.io
robbiemitchell 14y ago
Developers just cannot stop building blogging engines.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  It's our generation's text editor.
knes 14y ago
I hate you a little bit. I read the whole website and started looking for a download/signup link until I found out it is just a prototype, I'm very sad now. :( HOWEVER, your idea / prototype / concept looks awesome and it is something I have been waiting for!
benackles 14y ago
His argument about "No Corporate Arm of The Law" seems a little flawed. He compares WordPress to Mozilla and argues that Ghost will be more like Mozilla. Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit arm of Mozilla Foundation. They are nearly identical to the relationship between WordPress Foundation and Automattic inc. Each companies corporate arm generates revenue and reinvests those dollars and development resources back into their open source projects. This is the reason WordPress and FireFox have been such successful open source projects. They have the right balance of leadership, resources and community involvement.
- johnonolan 14y ago
  Hi Ben, it's my understanding that Mozilla Corp is 100% owned by the Mozilla Foundation, and that any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation are reinvested into the Mozilla project. The WordPress Foundation and Automattic Inc are two entirely separate entities. You are right in saying that they share a nearly identical relationship - however this small difference is extremely key to the difference in the overall philosophies of the platforms, in my opinion.
  - benackles 14y ago
    Hey John, First of all, gorgeous mockups! I love where you're headed with the design and user experience. The cluttered WordPress dashboard and clunky post editor are my least favorite aspects of WordPress. I also really like how you're incorporating Markdown syntax. There are a few points where I disagree. Forking WordPress would mean keeping loads of legacy code. It would also mean you'd be binding a future platform for publishing to technologies WordPress adopted nearly a decade ago. Why use PHP? Perhaps Python, Ruby or server-side JavaScript (Node.js) are better choices. Why use MySQL? MongoDB or PostgreSQL may be a better fit. Wouldn't merging 8+ configurable plugins into core be contradictory to avoiding bloat? Shouldn't you start with a clean slate? The plugin system is a great way to customize your environment to fit your individual needs. If you add defaults, you make it less personalized. You also add more bloat by adding functionality not everyone wants.
    - 14y ago
apruss 14y ago
All the "don't fork it, build it from scratch" and the opposite opinions aside, someone should actually do something about it. WordPress is indeed bloated and needs a solution faster than it takes for the X WordPress version to ship, which might be a year (or two) away.
krmmalik 14y ago
Question for photomatt if you're still reading this comment thread, and since it might be my only chance to get dialog with you. Are you considering any changes regards the stack, since many installations can have a issues with speed now (not intended as a criticism). So eg something like Postgres, or MongoDB even for the DB Backend?
- photomatt 14y ago
  Running WP.com, I'm very sensitive too the performance implications of our stack. A small percentage change in performance could mean the difference of racks of servers for us. At Automattic we've also had a peek behind the curtain of pretty much every high-scale WP installation out there. The vast majority of performance issues I've seen are not from something intrinsic to PHP or MySQL, but how people configure them. (MySQL is especially confounding.) There have been ports to other DBs but nothing that matches the performance of regular WP with a single layer of caching, like Batcache or Supercache. For dynamic pageviews, ck2 is correct, our biggest barrier is just the amount of code we're parsing and executing on every pageload, which a different DB backend would not change. This problem is bigger on WP.com. I think we can fix this by becoming more conservative and clever about what we load for a given page and it's something I expect to be addressed bit by bit over the next few releases. (BTW ck2 if you want to work on that, please ping me!)
  - sandGorgon 14y ago
    Would you consider moving to a database abstraction layer ? There are many of us here who are running postgres in production already and would like nothing better than to maintain one database engine that we can run and maintain. Again - I'm not advocating that you switch the default, but if switching database engines is not your bottleneck, then would you be willing to consider that option (maybe Kickstarter it)
    - markjaquith 14y ago
      We don't currently have any interest in moving to a database abstraction layer. We do, however, allow you to drop in a db.php file that can replace the core database portion. That's not abstraction (you'll have to rewrite any MySQL-isms to be compatible with your DB of choice), but it is an option for people who absolutely cannot run MySQL. Microsoft wrote a WordPress plugin to do something like that: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-database-abstraction/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-database-abstr...
sandGorgon 14y ago
Postgres - and you got my money.
shell0x 14y ago
I don't think thats a good idea to outsource comments to a third-party platform. I don't like wordpress much, but one of the few things I like is the native comment function.
nwienert 14y ago
If anyone is interested, the "refresh" branch of Obtvse implemented this "live preview while editing split screen" that he mocked up. https://github.com/natew/obtvse/tree/refresh https://github.com/natew/obtvse/tree/refresh http://cl.ly/image/0m3d3k230b47 http://cl.ly/image/0m3d3k230b47
onli 14y ago
You can't make a blog-software without comments. Well, you can try, but it wouldn't be a blog anymore. Letting the most important thing blogs achieve, enabling user-comments, get in the hand of proprietary external companies is totally absurd and a huge loss. That being said, I like the idea of a focussed blogging software. Probably because I sometimes contribute to one: Serendipity (http://www.s9y.org http://www.s9y.org). And there are so many different blogengines ones out there, including Wordpress-forks, and of course some of them focus on being a blog-software instead of a cms. Heck, like so many even I wrote a blog-software for myself, based on Sinatra, cached and with spamfilter and using browserid, which is already probably quite useable (https://github.com/onli/dsnblog https://github.com/onli/dsnblog, though the description paints the image of something more, till now it is only an almost complete blog).
- dorkrawk 14y ago
  I agree, the lack of comments stuck out like a sore thumb in an otherwise interesting proposal. There's no reason to take out the existing comment system from WP. It works! The option to disable comments or easily use something like Disqus seems like a fine idea but if you're hosting your own blog, there's a chance you'll want to host your own comments, too.
- tripzilch 14y ago
  Exactly. Comments were the thing that separated blogs from "well-updated homepage" in the first place. While I can see the author's point that WordPress somewhat lost its roots as a blogging platform, if you get rid of commenting, you're also losing those roots, in a different way. For me, Disqus is not really an option. It feels bloated and loads slow, and I've lost comments to its system many times, often because only after I typed the whole comment it let me know I needed to sign up, and sometimes that didn't work (I don't have Facebook, don't want to sign up with GMail or Twitter, maybe you get a throwaway email if you ask nicely). And then, something goes wrong during the signup procedure, and because the whole thing is made out of dynamic Javascript my post has disappeared and does no longer exist in my browser history forms either.
- dkuntz2 14y ago
  What do you mean you can't make a blog without comments? Definitionally a blog is a web log, or an online journal. There is no requirement that a blog have comments. Dustin Curtis' Svbtle is a recent blogging platform without comments, Jekyll and its brethren of blog-aware static-site generators are also without comments (unless the publisher adds them using an external service). Nobody needs comments, and there are many good reasons not to have comments on a blog, ranging from the fact that it removes the ability for people to impulsively write a negative comment for no reason other than to be negative to reducing server and database load.
jfmercer 14y ago
I would support this (that is, contribute code) if it wasn't written in PHP. Ruby, Python, Perl, node . . . anything but PHP.
hevyw8 14y ago
I was just about to poll my friends about a blogging platform in between Tumblr and Wordpress. Wordpress for my purposes has become analogous of iTunes.
pjbrunet 14y ago
I created a custom blog platform from scratch, a real one ;-) I was thinking about releasing it but got busy with other projects. You can see a sample post here: http://tomakefast.com/google-not-paying-publishers-for-rich-media-interactions-5239 http://tomakefast.com/google-not-paying-publishers-for-rich-... For comments, IntenseDebate. The backend is just four tables: options, posts, categories & feeds. (Yes, it aggregates feeds too.) Index.php does all the front-end work, another php file for the AJAX server, 4 more php files for the backend pages. Basically, interact with the database using AJAX datagrids. I can edit the blog without clicking Publish ;-)
mehulkar 14y ago
You should change "Less Options" to "Fewer Options". It's one of those things that if you know the difference, you can't stop noticing it everywhere.
forgotAgain 14y ago
I have this great idea for a really cool new product. It shouldn't take a good coder more than a couple of days. Contact me if your interested.
- __david__ 14y ago
  What a pointlessly snarky comment. I didn't see anything in the post that implied that the task was easy or that he was underestimating the work. He seemed to know the product, and to have even been involved with it directly at some point in time.
nickporter 14y ago
I really like the image drag and drop in the markdown editor!
malandrew 14y ago
Why is the title and the first three paragraphs an image instead of selectable text?
BUGHUNTER 14y ago
The most important thing would be a really good extension system - the wordpress plugin system is so massively broken and there are so many bad plugins - this crap must be sorted out - but it is a good place to study how to produce bad code. Extensibility is the key factor for any modern web framework / language / system. Also Wordpress is last-century with deployment options - there are no (built in) options for deployment and a smooth upgrade process including backups and optional rollbacks. The "automatic updates" claim by WP is btw. a good example for the limiting view of marketing jargon and how technical terms can be abused and this way educating millions of flies to eat tthe wrong food. Upgrade without rollback of course does not make sense and is no way "automatic". Please, if you build a new system, study modern web frameworks before and please do NOT use PHP.
jgv 14y ago
why is this web page a series of images?
mokash 14y ago
A lot of people are saying that you can't really make any significant changes because that would make a lot of plugins and themes incompatible with it. Well I say, keep Wordpress as it is but create a new version and invite some of the most popular theme and plugin authors to create their most popular themes and plugins for it before 'Ghost' goes out to the masses. Once people see how great it is, others will follow. I personally think this is a really good idea however, I wouldn't remove the comment system. I'd like Wordpress to be more flexible than it already is. I see websites like The Verge and Polygon, how they have different styles for different kinds of posts. They create beautiful reviews, very magazine-esque, how it's supposed to be. Giving this amount of control the users would allow authors to be a lot more creative and create even more beautiful and better websites than ever before.
kushti 14y ago
How much money you got for Macbook ads? They are annoying. And having nothing common with blogging platform idea.
webwanderings 14y ago
You should also develop a seamless and easy way to migrate blogs off of Wordpress and/or Wordpress.com. I also agree that they are taking WP to do too much and if you look at the history, it all seems like trying to keep up with the popular trends everywhere.
snotrockets 14y ago
A suggested fork of Wordpress (but not GPLed like Wordpress,) that requires giving external entities control of the comments on your blog, and with nothing but a few mockups in Photoshop to show for? I'm guessing all the 477 points came from those looking at the pretty pictures but ignoring the text (two extra points could have been awarded by the author and his SO.)
LittleBuddha87 14y ago
a really nice idea! I love it! I have in january next year time is there a repository where i can fork and work on it?

502 points by saltcod 14y ago

twodayslate 14y ago

Why is all the text a giant image? (That aside, the system looks great)

johnonolan 14y ago
Just because it's a rough concept, and I wanted to put it out as quickly as possible rather than delaying by procrastinating about coding a layout. I actually stole got the idea for making it a big page of images from the original .Mail concept page. If there's interest - of course we could put something more professional (and machine readable) together!
- csomar 14y ago
  I don't think it's justifiable. Lots of people can't read from an image. (For various reasons). I ended up closing the page because the font size is too small.
- paulsilver 14y ago
  I'd guessed this was to get something out the door quickly. It would be useful if you linked the FAQ image as a mailto to your e-mail address, or just through to your Twitter account. Having to type those out manually is a bit annoying.
- ckluis 14y ago
  Why not go the roots route? Build a parent theme/theme framework that does everything you want - while maintaining WordPress as its base. This allows you to take advantage of the changes in WordPress overtime - and allows users to switch to a full website if their blog takes off and they turn it into a company/personal website instead of blog. Best of both worlds. I think forking wordpress isn't as good of an idea as building a product which changes wordpress but still leaves everything in tact if someone wants to switch without requiring complex importing/exporting.
- calinet6 14y ago
  Yeah, my retina display gave you away. Looked pretty bad. This isn't a dig on your images or design (I really liked the ideas and design for sure)—but out of curiosity, do you find image layout easier or more difficult than CSS? I ask because if I wanted to build something like this, I'd go straight for HTML/CSS not because it's proper but because it would be faster and easier.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - lloeki 14y ago
    > Yeah, my retina display gave you away. Well my non-retina MacBook display gave it away too. I don't know if it's the original font or the rasterization, but the body font antialiasing looks poor, or at least uncanny compared to the native one.
- objclxt 14y ago
  It really put me off. It's not about making it machine-readable, it's about making it human readable for the sizeable number of people who are visually impaired, prefer or need to read in large print, are on high DPI devices, or even copy/paste. It's a massive, huge step backwards. I can't even search the page. I wanted to try and read all of it, but I gave up. I understand that it's quick and dirty, but I don't really think you should throw something out for comment when you can't even copy/paste from the source.
  - leeb 14y ago
    Just came to comment on the lack of accessibility for this page - thank you for pointing it out to the author. If you insist on using images instead of actual text, at LEAST add alt-text of the content to the images! Then the page would be screen-reader accessible.
  - MBCook 14y ago
    It's a terrible mistake. I can't read the site on my iPhone. I can't double tap to fit the text to the screen, it fits the image. If I zoom in, the text looks hazy since its not being re-rendered. Why would anyone do that?
- SquareWheel 14y ago
  I kept trying to select the text (when I scroll that's how I keep my place on the page). You probably don't need to re-do this page, but consider a text option in the future.
juan_juarez 14y ago
Why did you have to point that out? I quickly transitioned from "ho-hum" to "must kill".

nex_ 14y ago

I like it but please drop "apple" stuff screenshot.

TobbenTM 14y ago
Yeah, the whole thing felt like an Apple keynote in text. "One more thing:"

krogsgard 14y ago

These are some beautiful concepts by John. However, I think it's also worth noting that just about everyone that works with WordPress wants to see the interface itself be simplified, even if most of us want to retain its flexibility as a CMS. Here are some related notes from Matt Mullenweg on a "radically simplified WordPress" http://ma.tt/2012/05/simpler/ http://ma.tt/2012/05/simpler/ I'd like to see something like Ghost as a step two of Matt's thoughts, rather than a fork or separate project.

JamesSL 14y ago
At this stage I think a fork is needed, the work needed to change the core, the people behind WordPress just won't get behind.
- calinet6 14y ago
  Stop calling it a fork—it needs a radically different core. So start over from the ground up! It needs to be a new project, not a fork.
- krogsgard 14y ago
  Unrealistic for software that powers over 20% of all new websites. Also, a bit presumptuous of the core team. I think there is a lot of support for a simplified UI (see Matt's post above). Just because there is a barrier before you get patches submitted doesn't make the core team unwilling. Each decision needs fleshing out before getting put into a new version of WP. If it wasn't that way, the project would be a (total) mess.
  - JamesSL 14y ago
    Its WordPress' support for older versions and depreciated plugins which is of the bigger issues.
    - nacin 14y ago
      Our commitment to backwards compatibility simply forces us to make smarter, more deliberate decisions. Because we talk so much about our back compat efforts, it is certainly understandable that people might think that is where almost all of our development effort goes. But that isn't actually the case. We heavily emphasize our philosophies because it makes adopting and updating WordPress easier, and we want users to know that. But in practice, the way we build software doesn't hamstring us. We've introduced new features and rewritten entire APIs without needlessly breaking plugins or sites. And we do sometimes drop stuff -- we are just careful about it. We do whatever is necessary to make WordPress evolve. In the end, we've simply become really good at following through.

ck2 14y ago

The whole page is images, and it's a non-existent product, it's just a theory/proposal. Buried in the text is it would be a fork of wordpress. Net is filled with that sentiment, but it never takes off: http://www.google.com/search?q=fork+wordpress&tbo=1&prmdo=1 http://www.google.com/search?q=fork+wordpress&tbo=1&... If you want to replace wordpress you need a modern rewrite, not a fork. The #1 problem of wordpress (among many) is it loads every darn thing on every darn page and it's now a godzilla of a program so it's becoming a huge nightmare. A cache miss in WordPress on a busy server is a horrible, horrible thing. You cannot escape that problem by a fork.

calinet6 14y ago
This would absolutely be better solved by an entirely new application, written from the ground up. And the whole-page-is-images thing really bothered me too. Some nice designs and interesting ideas for sure, and knowing CSS isn't a prerequisite for being a designer, but damn, I have some doubts about the understanding of the technologies here. Which is probably exactly where the concept of "forking Wordpress" came from—a misunderstanding of exactly what that would entail. Modern rewrite is what's needed, definitely. But don't call it anything related to Wordpress. Don't need to.
- johnonolan 14y ago
  I've been committing code to the core WordPress codebase for 3 years, so while I'm not a PHP developer - I have some idea. Perhaps one thing overlooked in the argument for fork vs new build is that there aren't a huge number of developers with the skills to make this happen who would do it entirely on an Open Source contribution basis as opposed to, say, a startup basis. Appealing to existing WordPress developers, businesses and users, as well as cutting down time to ship first working concept, are (in my mind) some important arguments in favour of a fork.
  - tsewlliw 14y ago
    I'm relatively new to the WP scene, and already its totally clear that WordPress is tolerated because it has a vibrant ecosystem. Getting to keep that is way bigger factor in uptake over the next five years than anything a rewrite could deliver.

mars 14y ago

"wordpress is awesome"... NOT

mokash 14y ago
A well written argument with plenty of valid points. I'm just going to stop using Wordpress now.
- mars 14y ago
  i don't think it's the right place to go into detail here, but there are so many things which make wordpress NOT awesome, that i cannot take anyone seriously who states that wordpress IS awesome. architecture, performance, wordpress's code itself, templating, continious security issues just to name a few.
  - mmishra 14y ago
    Is there any alternative ? I guess there platform is very generic that is why there are 1000s of themes. I was able to build up http://syncfin.com http://syncfin.com in less than a month using wordpress and with an awesome theme. I believe it is a great platform but would like to know if there is any alternative ? I am not looking for RoR or DJango for just a simple blogging needs until there is some significant performance improvement prrof.

timmyd 14y ago

It's a super interesting concept because I think more sites are using wordpress as a CMS and the custom skinning for wordpress sites has a spanned a new industry in itself. As a site note: super +1 for the very last comment, made me laugh. "i hate it/hate you/hate everything - Noted. Haters gonna hate."

timdorr 14y ago

So, this is basically Ghost:Wordpress::Firefox:Mozilla.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

SparrowOS 14y ago

http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25925 http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25925 India-nigger in denial on God. What do You think of Ghandi, God? God says... weaken lost IT Cross suspense Bear If dry naked storing force journey sold vail Paulus Glad roared fatness afterwards Ostia divine recovering creation respected yield offerings cleansed emerging familiar clasp ABOUT alloy delight suggestion countenance descend remember VI Exodus deserve http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=/watch%3Fv%3DpfoR2w61LdE http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=/watch%3Fv%3DpfoR... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1YcNT-v2ik http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1YcNT-v2ik ---- God knows what you're going to think like an old couple completing each other's sentences. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts%202&version=NIV http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts%202&ver... God says... 7:24 Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: 7:25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. 7:26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: 7:27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it. 7:28 And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine: 7:29 For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. 8:1 When he was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him. ---- These are like ink blots or cloud animal shapes. God says... hast bends containing inflicted difficult Though ---- Saw robot video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-KxjVlaLBmk# https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...! God says... was glad. 8:16 The Jews had light, and gladness, and joy, and honour. 8:17 And in every province, and in every city, whithersoever the king's commandment and his decree came, the Jews had joy and gladness, a feast and a good day. And many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them. 9:1 Now in the twelfth month, that is, the month Adar, on the thirteenth day of the same, when the king's commandment and his decree drew near to be put in execution, in the day that the enemies of the Jews hoped to have power over them, (though it was turned to the contrary, that the Jews had rule over them that hated them;) 9:2 The Jews gathered themselves together in their cities throughout all the provinces of the king Ahasuerus, to lay hand on such as sought their hurt: and no man could withstand them; for the fear of them fell upon all people. ---- An "Adder" is a logic circuit. "hazardous"? ---- God says... effort fools orbs resolved ointments diversely ipod Giver bed hairs discomfort Catastrophic_Success ingrated calls congratulation missing joking disentangle thyself turned evermore Michael behind crowned Animals hesitate words materials fit strangely don't_worry reclaiming opinion Orestes rocks downer resisteth curb hot subsists bodies achieve enigma moderation excepted stars houseless ranged fig unpraised righteous it wallow students indued ungodly giant tale PARTICULAR morrow afterward procured events darkness abstinence yea irons Thefts Turn story millennium begged text fields staggered magnified drives people's free goest rob editions certain dully suffrages veiled Kazakhstan ---- Hot iron manipulation with robot fingers is exciting. You like this, God? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBfygUiS50g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBfygUiS50g God says... 5:9 And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him; 5:10 Called of God an high priest after the order of Melchisedec. 5:11 Of whom we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered, seeing ye are dull of hearing. 5:12 For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. 5:13 For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. 5:14 But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. ---- Radio is talking about storm disruption. You wanna appologize to anybody, God, accidental victims? You said after Katrina, "Suffering simplifies life" from Chuck Swindol's Wisdom for the Way. God says... shall they come in unto you: for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods: Solomon clave unto these in love. 11:3 And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart. 11:4 For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father. 11:5 For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites. 11:6 And Solomon did evil in the sight of the LORD, and went not fully after the LORD, as did David his father. 11:7 Then did Solomon build an high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon. ---- God says... meditations sighs deception bitter unchangeable oratory wove seeth I'm_not_dead_yet choler unlimited tempts mirth intercourse tempers sufferedst fantasies plucked community contemplating wherefore Kazakhstan I_could_be_wrong finish slipped Corrected dissoluteness unlike ---- My heart not right? Fuck New York, they surely deserved it, if God schmacked them. I'm on God's side. God says... 2:15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. 2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: 2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. 2:18 And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. 2:19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 2:20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. ---- The big apple. ROFLMAO. I wuv God. Where would You claim residency, God, for voting? God says... Paul the prisoner called me unto him, and prayed me to bring this young man unto thee, who hath something to say unto thee. 23:19 Then the chief captain took him by the hand, and went with him aside privately, and asked him, What is that thou hast to tell me? 23:20 And he said, The Jews have agreed to desire thee that thou wouldest bring down Paul to morrow into the council, as though they would enquire somewhat of him more perfectly. 23:21 But do not thou yield unto them: for there lie in wait for him of them more than forty men, which have bound themselves with an oath, that they will neither eat nor drink till they have killed him: and now are they ready, looking for a promise from thee. 23:22 So the chief captain then let the young man depart, and charged him, See thou tell no man that thou hast shewed these things to me. 23:23 And he called unto him two centurions, saying, Make ready two hundred soldiers to go to Caesarea, and horsemen threescore and ten, and spearmen two hundred, at the third hour of the night; 23:24 And provide them beasts, that they may set Paul on, and bring him safe unto Felix the governor. ---- God says... tolerated don't_count_on_it catch Knock_you_upside_the_head sorrowfulness states private rolling wherefore princes covenanted readers Notwithstanding withdrawing explain profited Unity fictions execrable enquired personally truer ruminating paid sealed cultivated lashest mass Maker suggests oh_come_on shameful sickly inebriate lovest strengthenedst openeth nominally seducing evening than contests plenteous I_love_you richer reject shamelessness distract You generation what_do_you_want wilderness See cause conjecture encouraging truly furnished promised concludeth softening shunning amiable steered encompass //gutenberg cellars ---- I have to explain the passage--Paul claimed to be a Roman Citizen. Interpretation would be a joke about citizenship.

import 14y ago

Forking WP is not a solution (maybe bad). If you want to make a revolution write a blog app from scratch.

mseebach 14y ago

"People often say that WordPress is free as in speech, not as in beer" Do they? What do they mean? Can't you download the full, working source code of Wordpress anymore?

johnonolan 14y ago
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
- mseebach 14y ago
  Yes? That page says that GPL'd software is free software. WordPress is GPL'd. TFA seems to imply there's something unfree about WP, I'm trying to find out what it means by that.
qeorge 14y ago
The author has the saying backwards. WP is free as in beer (you don't pay for it) but not as in speech (you can't do whatever you want with it because of the GPL).
- mseebach 14y ago
  It can't be that. He wants to fork WP, so the resulting software would also be GPL.
stan_rogers 14y ago
The point, if I understand correctly, is that WP is libre and nominally gratis, but it has become so complicated (and resource-heavy) since its conception as a blogging platform that it often costs real money to get it up and running satisfactorily. And there is a certain truth to that; it has, to an extent, become consultantware at industry scale, and often forces even "lightweight" personal sites onto more expensive hosting plans due to file loads, database hits and memory usage. There are "standard" plugins that can help a lot, but that's pretty much opaque to the typical non-technical end user, and it takes more than a passing knowledge of, say, HTML+CSS to style/theme a WP site. Free themes, which a user will often turn to after giving up on the idea of learning to write their own theme are often multiply base64-encoded (and just as often are ad-plagued and/or malware-harboring), and after being bitten once or twice, people resort to paying for themes or to have themes created for them. Not much, perhaps, but more than the "free" (gratis) software they thought they were buying into.

HyprMusic 14y ago

There's a little bit of contradiction in your desires: you say you want to keep "exactly the same theme and plug-in structure" but you also want to limit backwards compatibility. You also say you want to remove bloat and non-core features yet you want to bundle a load of questionable plug-ins. The nicer interface and UI would be welcomed, but I think if you start going too far you'll detract away from Wordpress's core appeal. Don't forget there are many alternatives to Wordpress that have more features built-in, but Wordpress has succeeded because it's simple, flexible and easy.

whalesalad 14y ago

For those of you who might want to follow the dude on Twitter, but tried to copy/paste his username and realized it was an image: http://twitter.com/johnonolan http://twitter.com/johnonolan John makes some great points, which is why I'd like to follow him and see the progression of this. One of us (or a few of us) are going to need to just get down-n-dirty and start building it. The internet is indeed filled with a lot of sentiment for rebuilding WordPress. Most of us who've worked with WP a long time (since b2) have considered it (myself included). I'd love to roll out of bed one morning and press a red LAUNCH button that releases a fresh new fork of WordPress to the world that's compatible with most of it's theme/plugin ecosystem.

EnderMB 14y ago

I'd almost like to see it go the other way. WordPress is a good blog, but a poor CMS choice for anything but the most basic of websites. I reckon the "66%" that use WordPress use it for personal sites or very small business sites (1-10 visitors a day) on shared hosting. There are huge sites using it, but they seem to be the exception that proves the rule. I cannot see why people use WordPress over the likes of Concrete5 or a full CMS on any other platform outside of WordPress being accessible for entry-level developers. For this reason, a full rewrite of WordPress to be solely a basic CMS would probably have these novice developers flock to the system, allowing WordPress to scale back down to doing what it does best.

gabemart 14y ago
>I cannot see why people use WordPress over the likes of Concrete5 or a full CMS on any other platform outside of WordPress being accessible for entry-level developers. I run a very modestly profitable website that gets about 1k visitors per day. I'm not even an "entry-level developer", I'm not a developer at all, with only the most rudimentary ability to kludge together a little JS and php. I chose Wordpress for the site, even though it's not a blog. In fact, creating a system where posts weren't displayed in chronological order actually took a few hours of blindly hacking at various WP functions. The reasons I chose Wordpress over an existing CMS: * I already know how to use WP * There is a vast array of FLOSS themes and plugins to meet virtually any need available * Wordpress is well supported by shared hosting and managed VPS providers (through cpanel etc.) * It's relatively easy to get free high-level support through IRC because so many people know WP Most of these reasons are inertia based. It would be a vast undertaking to create a CMS version of Wordpress that actually gained traction because, awkward as WP is, it has an enormous library of free existing solutions to take on virtually any problem. This quality, which the author of the article complains about, it the same reason WP would be so hard to kill. Even if your product is better for a given purpose, people aren't going to give up the advantages of WP I outlined above just for an incremental improvement in UX or speed.
photomatt 14y ago
Because it's easy to develop for, can scale to be one of the top ten sites on the internet, and your users won't need training to use it. Now I'll be the first to tell people there are certain things that you should build from scratch, but the examples of what people build with WordPress can be pretty breathtaking even to me: http://wordpress.org/showcase/ http://wordpress.org/showcase/

dave1010uk 14y ago

As someone who makes WordPress sites almost 8 hours a day, what would be the best start is a rewrite of the WordPress core on a popular, modern framework (my vote would be Symfony2). This would bring a breath of fresh air to coding for WordPress. Ideally much of the API would be similar too.

ivanbernat 14y ago
However, OP says WP is over 3mb. Including any popular PHP framework means adding a lot of weight in the start (take CakePHP for example).
rmccue 14y ago
One of the things we're looking at moving forward is using things like this. We're taking a look at various frameworks at the moment as we look to move forward on a few issues (such as request variable abstraction, for which we're looking at Symfony's HttpFoundation/HttpKernel). However, WordPress still supports PHP 5.2, whereas most frameworks are now 5.3+. There's still a huge [1] userbase still on 5.2, so dropping it isn't really possible at this point in time. [1]: http://wordpress.org/about/stats/ http://wordpress.org/about/stats/

tibbon 14y ago

This proposal makes many good points. If I were rewriting Wordpress, here's what I'd think of: - Seriously consider redesigning the logical layout of the software. Some sort of rough MVC-ish pattern would be a huge improvement over the 'loop' in Wordpress which is almost impossible to deal with. - I personally dislike PHP, but I do see its benefits in deployment. - Make it easy to make beautiful typographic layouts. There's a reason this 1-page wasn't done in Wordpress itself; it is almost impossible to make 'hand-crafted-web' looks in Wordpress without deep CSS and HTML diving. Great blog post layouts shouldn't be that hard. Not all content is the same.

wmeredith 14y ago
I'm pretty sure the, 'hand-crafted-web' look is going to require deep CSS and HTML diving anyway you slice it.
- tibbon 14y ago
  True. Perhaps a Wordpress varient would allow for per-post CSS files. I haven't touched WP in a few years; does it have the equivalent of the Rails Asset Pipeline yet?
  - wmeredith 14y ago
    I don't know much of anything about Rails. As for the per-post CSS files it would be easy to do with a Posts custom field. You could take text input (CSS) and spit it out in the header using a basic query on the current post.
    - jtallant 14y ago
      Splitting everything up like that also makes it a lot of fun when you want to redesign your site ;-)
  - photomatt 14y ago
    It's old but it still works fine, check out the Art Direction plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/art-direction/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/art-direction/

kmfrk 14y ago

Note to the author: if you throw those images into ImageOptim, you can save at least 15%. Probably convenient when you get hit by HN - and don't seem to be hosting images on S3. http://imageoptim.com/ http://imageoptim.com/

JimWestergren 14y ago
I prefer Yahoo! YSlow Smush.it [1] which does this for you online. [1] http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/ http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/
- anatoli 14y ago
  ImageOptim can be configured to reduce the size by a lot more than any of the online tools will. If you're on a Mac, there's no reason to use anything other than ImageOptim and ImageAlpha[1]. [1] http://pngmini.com http://pngmini.com
  - kmfrk 14y ago
    Wow. Never knew about ImageAlpha. Thanks for the link.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

JimWestergren 14y ago

What is needed is a rewrite and not a fork. But why Open Source? Such a proper rewrite is a big undertaking and I don't see how that could be pulled off without financial compensation. Why not offer it for let's say $19 per domain? I would easily pay for it and I am sure many others. This way you could at least pay salaries to developers working on it.

lachlanj 14y ago
Jim, this idea (private and pay per domain) is already done extremely well by squarespace.com

avolcano 14y ago

Have to say, the most intriguing ideas I saw in the concept were the two "split view" concepts - one for managing blog posts, and one for writing posts. Has any blogging platform implemented anything like that? I know there are Markdown editors with a split view, but I don't know of any that are web-based, nor any that are integrated into existing blogging platforms. And I've definitely never seen any "manage/edit old posts" system as clean and simple as the one in the concept. Oh, and btw, a brilliant concept that's super easy to miss - being able to type "(image)" in the editor pane and seeing an image upload placeholder in the preview pane. It's a small thing, but one of those things that seems way more obvious than it actually is.

rada 14y ago
There is aero snap. There are browser extensions. You can easily have your split view today, for any website, without re-writing anything. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn97WbalJwM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn97WbalJwM http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/features/snap http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/feature... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fox-splitter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fox-splitter/
thenomad 14y ago
The aged Rails blogging app Typo did this, and it was very useful.
nwienert 14y ago
Obtvse did: https://github.com/natew/obtvse/tree/refresh https://github.com/natew/obtvse/tree/refresh http://cl.ly/image/0m3d3k230b47 http://cl.ly/image/0m3d3k230b47 It keeps position as you scroll and write.
tripzilch 14y ago
From an aesthetic point of view, I'd really want the Markdown code to be more visually distinct from the preview. I'd love something like the "Oblivion" colours in gedit for instance, although I am aware that opinions differ on dark backgrounds :) It would give a nice visual distinction though, like the old "underwater" mode in WordPerfect.

kijin 14y ago

> Less Options ... there are still too many options, too many settings, too many things which you have an unnecessary level of control over in the administrative user interface ... Things that many people have never even used. Ghost would get rid of all that. And you hope to captivate the hearts and minds of the open-source developer community? Haven't you seen what happened with earlier versions of GNOME 3 and Unity? We love options. We love settings. We don't want them gone, we just want them neatly organized and tucked away in an inconspicuous corner so that we can tweak them at lunchtime. You yourself might have never used an obscure feature, such as posting by e-mail, but other people do use it every day, and will never switch unless they can keep using it. In fact, there exists an entire blogging platform (Posterous) that is based on the premise of posting by e-mail. Even my grandfather, who is utterly lost when it comes to regular blogging, can use Posterous because he knows how to send e-mail. Since Posterous is now on life support, I've been considering migrating him to one or another WordPress platform, precisely because WordPress supports posting by e-mail. If your fork removes this feature, it will fall right off my radar. I'm sure that somebody else will be able to tell a similar story regarding any WordPress feature that you think is unnecessary or unrelated to blogging. For example, "No Comments": excellent, now I need to send all my visitors to a third party who specializes in tracking them across the world wide web. Someone who had a blog about online privacy might consider it a case of hypocrisy. It's easy to drop options and features that you don't see yourself using as part of "blogging". Anyone can do it, and each person who tries will get a product that fits his or her definition of "blogging". Such products, however, won't gain widespread use like WordPress has. A much more difficult but potentially rewarding task is to reorganize options and features so that casual users get sane defaults and power users can tweak to their heart's content. It takes a lot of careful thinking, planning, asking around, and UX experience to get this right, but once you do get it right, the difference can be stunning. As the saying goes, 80% of people only use 20% of features, but each person uses a different 20%. One solution would be to organize these "extra" features into easily installable plugins, and to have those plugins ready before you sign off on your first official release. That would prevent the kind of negative publicity that surrounded the premature releases of some Linux interfaces. But another section of your write-up gives the impression that you don't want that many plugins, either. PS: But you should definitely kill the ability to edit themes using the web interface. It's a security nightmare, leaving so many critical files writable by the web server. Also, the split view looks wonderful.

geekfactor 14y ago

I'd like to see a fork Ghost as a Rails app. Anyone game?

JamesSL 14y ago
Will be all over this should things go ahead.
cheald 14y ago
The problem is that Wordpress is vehemently anti-MVC, and its plugin structure depends on this. You'd have to design an entirely different system to work on Rails.
startupnerd 14y ago
keen to learn rails - maybe Ghost will be a fun little project
nir 14y ago
You know, IIRC the first Rails demo actually used building a blog app as example. 8 years later and still no one has come up with a real Wordpress/Drupal/Mediawiki alternative - or at least none that's gained any significant userbase. I often wonder why..

alphex 14y ago

This is a problem being answered with a half dozen other projects. (I'm, admittedly a drupal guy. But I even know whats wrong with Drupal...) Symfony, as a core framework for CMS's gives an amazing bedrock to build exactly what you're talking about. ... Just as an example of something else that exists that is working forward towards exactly what you're wanting to build, you should check out Apostrophe, http://apostrophenow.org/ http://apostrophenow.org/ And then theres the 90 other projects that exist on 90 other languages... But yeah, don't fork Wordpress, make something better.

lionhearted 14y ago

Very cool. Any thoughts on going the other direction -- the dedicated CMS way?

notatoad 14y ago
There are plenty of dedicated CMS. The last thing we need is another one. Although I suppose you could say the same thing about blogging platforms.

taylorbuley 14y ago

Very interesting ideas here, for me particulary in the "free as in Mozilla, not as in Automattic" angle. Some might consider it blasphemy to say Auttomattic and WordPress have divergent goals so I'm glad people are having the discussion. All that said, I'm not sure I want a CMS from someone who uses images for text instead of actual text http://john.onolan.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/81.png http://john.onolan.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/81.png

uglyclown 14y ago
^ This. The author of the page has obviously no idea what he's talking about.

EwanToo 14y ago

Personally, and I know this is a ridiculous dream, I'd rather see a clone of Wordpress functionality which maintained 95%+ plugin compatibility, but which had things like caching built-in (and just more sensible handing of files and databases in general).

rglover 14y ago

So is the argument to improve the visuals of WP, it's functionality, or both? If I'm grabbing the thesis statement properly, it sounds like the idea is to make WP more flexible as a CMS. If so, that'd be very handy. I'm not sure how it would work logistically, but it'd be cool if admins could flip a switch (maybe in wp-config) that makes a site either "blog" mode or "CMS" mode. Sort of like what you have to do to make a site networked (i.e. multiple blogs same domain). I like John's ideas here, and this is something that should be talked about. If John has ties back to WP, though, I would present the ideas and make a case for letting him head up design or experience. The forking thing could get way out of hand (and confuse a lot of people). Short of that, I'd say take the Ghost name and start building your own platform. It'd be cool to see another open competitor to WP. Especially if it shared a lot of the same principles.

zacharyvoase 14y ago

> Ghost would be developed openly, and it would encourage contribution. Until > now, Open Source projects have often had an incredibly high barier [sic] to > entry for contribution, which is so complicated and convoluted that only > advanced-level developers have ever really had a hope of getting involved. > Ghost would facilitate open and easy contribution from people with different > skillsets to help grow and evolve the platform. Because designers and > developers working together to solve problems always produces a better end > result. N.B.: I'm talking from my experience with other open-source projects; I haven't worked with Wordpress before but I think there are some generalizations here that need addressing. I disagree that there's an ‘incredibly’ high barrier to entry with many FLOSS projects, over and above the technical ability to read and understand what's happening in the code (which cannot be made up for through community efforts, or indeed forking). The language used in this passage presents these issues as manufactured or intended, and therefore as problems that can be fixed by simply making different decisions. But they're fundamentally issues of community, and of time/attention management on the part of the core developers, and they require extraordinary patience. It's very easy to say "get designers and developers working together". But, as I've seen with DevOps (which is the principle of "developers and operations working together"), the phrase "working together" is often used without any understanding of its meaning. I don't want to come across as a naysayer. But seriously, if you have the answers to the problems presented here, a lot of people would love to know.

photomatt 14y ago

I really like some of the things John has done in his mockups here, especially on the write screen, and contrary to what he thinks ideas like this are more than welcome in the WordPress community. (For example check out the dramatically revamped media or the dozens of eliminated options in trunk right now.) The one big mistake in his premise, however, is that only 34% of WordPress users are blogging, the actual percentage is much higher. The survey he quotes me talking about was of mostly people who make their living building WordPress sites (over 20,000) and mostly WordPress.org users. This community naturally focuses (and contributes) more on the CMS and application framework side of WordPress. On WordPress.com, however, the vast majority of its millions of users blog, and are blogging more every day. If you visit WP.com you will see a simplified and streamlined user experience that is boldly different from the traditional wp-admin dashboard. Already we've seen huge boosts in user engagement from this new experience, and while it's a few dozen iterations from being ready I'm confident the best concepts will make their way back into WordPress core when they are ready. But overall, I love seeing different people's takes on what the next generation of WordPress will look like, and I wish more people did blog posts like this. We've had 3 dramatic shifts in our evolution before, and the shape the next one will take is a topic that occupies most of my waking hours, mind space, and creativity. And don't even get me started on mobile... :)

gozmike 14y ago
Is it safe to say that without a vastly improved mobile experience WordPress is in serious trouble? As a huge fan of the WordPress community and what the software and platform has empowered, I'm seeing a decreasing amount of interest in blogging as my social network turns toward meme-sharing and 140-character quips simply because they're much more conducive to consumption and sharing on mobile. It's so bad that there are startups trying to fix this like Blogstand (http://blogstand.co http://blogstand.co - our project). We know that others are attempting the same (and they should be!)
- photomatt 14y ago
  > Is it safe to say that without a vastly improved mobile experience WordPress is in serious trouble? I would 100% agree with that.

dylanhassinger 14y ago

I love this, except for the part about building popular plugins into the core. That sounds like a path to more feature bloat. Instead, what if there were a small set of plugins that were "Recommended by Ghost". They could be lightweight and specially geared for extending Ghost. But still totally optional. (sort of like Jetpack I guess)

wolfparade 14y ago

build this on top of jekyll or its a fail.

agius 14y ago
Developer of https://jekyllhub.com https://jekyllhub.com here. I think Jekyll might be over-complicated for what Ghost is going for. WordPress and the hypothetical Ghost seem to target the mass-market; Jekyll is mostly about power features. Easy integration with git via the filesystem, code highlighting with pygments, configuration with yaml... most people really wouldn't care about that kind of stuff.

skeltoac 14y ago

johnonolan I agree with the sentiment that got you there, but not with where you went. Because if you're just going to fork WordPress anyway, all you really need to do is replace the wp-admin theme. Yeah, I said wp-admin theme. It's not generally considered a theme but that's what it is: the core-provided view of everything you can touch when you're an admin. Try thinking of the back end the same way you think of a front-end theme. Unfortunately WordPress has not yet devoted a development cycle to making the entire admin area easily pluggable. Any seasoned WordPress developer could hack together a plugin that hijacks wp-admin URLs and displays its own interface. Several have. Wouldn't that satisfy your requirements? Of course none of that addresses the issues around efficiency and performance. My hope is that WordPress will finally undergo a deep refactoring to remove its worst practices even if it means forcing updates to popular plugins and themes. There is no longer a reason to fear mass defection from the community for pulling that trigger. After the initial shock the changes would be embraced and everyone would enjoy better performance.

iuguy 14y ago

It looks really nice and I'd look into it if it existed, but it doesn't. Is there some sort of trend rising in putting mockups of vapourware? I really like the split screen and markdown support. That would definitely get my interest. But please, ship 0.1 and let us know, don't tease us with vapourware.

hippich 14y ago

I guess it will cost me some karma, but... Yes! Please do it. And put large text saying "This is blogging platform. Please DO NOT build your next e-commerce site using this software." :)

sergiotapia 14y ago

I'd love for a blogging platform that let me use custom CSS, Markdown (because I post code all the time on my blog) and free hosting. Where is something like that? Wordpress, atrocious code support. Jekyll, too much configuration. I don't want to learn Jekyll I just want to post code. Where is the middle ground for people like me? Sounds like this hypothetical "Ghost" is just what I'm looking for. Now if someone could build it...

cooperadymas 14y ago
I recommend http://getkirby.com/ http://getkirby.com/ (Not affiliated, but a fan.) It's worth the $39, but you can try it on a non-public site before you buy. It's incredibly simple, powered by plain text markdown files, easy to extend, and there is a "Panel" plugin that gives a very basic backend. Very little setup since it runs on PHP and without a true database. You can also connect it with Dropbox if you have the server permissions, to make editing files even easier.
agius 14y ago
Hey - I'm making a thing called https://jekyllhub.com https://jekyllhub.com - it's designed to take the pain our of Jekyll and get you blogging quickly and easily. I'd love to get your feedback on it. If you send me your email, I can make you a free lifetime account: andrew@atevans.com Cheers!
davewasthere 14y ago
Github pages and prose.io would do the trick for you then. I really like Ghost, but as a front-end to a github-pages/Jekyll powered blog. It'd be exactly what I'm after.
- sergiotapia 14y ago
  I've tried Github Pages, not intuitive AT ALL, terrible user experience. I'll look into prose.io

robbiemitchell 14y ago

Developers just cannot stop building blogging engines.

jacques_chester 14y ago
It's our generation's text editor.

knes 14y ago

I hate you a little bit. I read the whole website and started looking for a download/signup link until I found out it is just a prototype, I'm very sad now. :( HOWEVER, your idea / prototype / concept looks awesome and it is something I have been waiting for!

benackles 14y ago

His argument about "No Corporate Arm of The Law" seems a little flawed. He compares WordPress to Mozilla and argues that Ghost will be more like Mozilla. Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit arm of Mozilla Foundation. They are nearly identical to the relationship between WordPress Foundation and Automattic inc. Each companies corporate arm generates revenue and reinvests those dollars and development resources back into their open source projects. This is the reason WordPress and FireFox have been such successful open source projects. They have the right balance of leadership, resources and community involvement.

johnonolan 14y ago
Hi Ben, it's my understanding that Mozilla Corp is 100% owned by the Mozilla Foundation, and that any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation are reinvested into the Mozilla project. The WordPress Foundation and Automattic Inc are two entirely separate entities. You are right in saying that they share a nearly identical relationship - however this small difference is extremely key to the difference in the overall philosophies of the platforms, in my opinion.
- benackles 14y ago
  Hey John, First of all, gorgeous mockups! I love where you're headed with the design and user experience. The cluttered WordPress dashboard and clunky post editor are my least favorite aspects of WordPress. I also really like how you're incorporating Markdown syntax. There are a few points where I disagree. Forking WordPress would mean keeping loads of legacy code. It would also mean you'd be binding a future platform for publishing to technologies WordPress adopted nearly a decade ago. Why use PHP? Perhaps Python, Ruby or server-side JavaScript (Node.js) are better choices. Why use MySQL? MongoDB or PostgreSQL may be a better fit. Wouldn't merging 8+ configurable plugins into core be contradictory to avoiding bloat? Shouldn't you start with a clean slate? The plugin system is a great way to customize your environment to fit your individual needs. If you add defaults, you make it less personalized. You also add more bloat by adding functionality not everyone wants.
  - 14y ago

apruss 14y ago

All the "don't fork it, build it from scratch" and the opposite opinions aside, someone should actually do something about it. WordPress is indeed bloated and needs a solution faster than it takes for the X WordPress version to ship, which might be a year (or two) away.

krmmalik 14y ago

Question for photomatt if you're still reading this comment thread, and since it might be my only chance to get dialog with you. Are you considering any changes regards the stack, since many installations can have a issues with speed now (not intended as a criticism). So eg something like Postgres, or MongoDB even for the DB Backend?

photomatt 14y ago
Running WP.com, I'm very sensitive too the performance implications of our stack. A small percentage change in performance could mean the difference of racks of servers for us. At Automattic we've also had a peek behind the curtain of pretty much every high-scale WP installation out there. The vast majority of performance issues I've seen are not from something intrinsic to PHP or MySQL, but how people configure them. (MySQL is especially confounding.) There have been ports to other DBs but nothing that matches the performance of regular WP with a single layer of caching, like Batcache or Supercache. For dynamic pageviews, ck2 is correct, our biggest barrier is just the amount of code we're parsing and executing on every pageload, which a different DB backend would not change. This problem is bigger on WP.com. I think we can fix this by becoming more conservative and clever about what we load for a given page and it's something I expect to be addressed bit by bit over the next few releases. (BTW ck2 if you want to work on that, please ping me!)
- sandGorgon 14y ago
  Would you consider moving to a database abstraction layer ? There are many of us here who are running postgres in production already and would like nothing better than to maintain one database engine that we can run and maintain. Again - I'm not advocating that you switch the default, but if switching database engines is not your bottleneck, then would you be willing to consider that option (maybe Kickstarter it)
  - markjaquith 14y ago
    We don't currently have any interest in moving to a database abstraction layer. We do, however, allow you to drop in a db.php file that can replace the core database portion. That's not abstraction (you'll have to rewrite any MySQL-isms to be compatible with your DB of choice), but it is an option for people who absolutely cannot run MySQL. Microsoft wrote a WordPress plugin to do something like that: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-database-abstraction/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-database-abstr...

sandGorgon 14y ago

Postgres - and you got my money.

shell0x 14y ago

I don't think thats a good idea to outsource comments to a third-party platform. I don't like wordpress much, but one of the few things I like is the native comment function.

nwienert 14y ago

If anyone is interested, the "refresh" branch of Obtvse implemented this "live preview while editing split screen" that he mocked up. https://github.com/natew/obtvse/tree/refresh https://github.com/natew/obtvse/tree/refresh http://cl.ly/image/0m3d3k230b47 http://cl.ly/image/0m3d3k230b47

onli 14y ago

You can't make a blog-software without comments. Well, you can try, but it wouldn't be a blog anymore. Letting the most important thing blogs achieve, enabling user-comments, get in the hand of proprietary external companies is totally absurd and a huge loss. That being said, I like the idea of a focussed blogging software. Probably because I sometimes contribute to one: Serendipity (http://www.s9y.org http://www.s9y.org). And there are so many different blogengines ones out there, including Wordpress-forks, and of course some of them focus on being a blog-software instead of a cms. Heck, like so many even I wrote a blog-software for myself, based on Sinatra, cached and with spamfilter and using browserid, which is already probably quite useable (https://github.com/onli/dsnblog https://github.com/onli/dsnblog, though the description paints the image of something more, till now it is only an almost complete blog).

dorkrawk 14y ago
I agree, the lack of comments stuck out like a sore thumb in an otherwise interesting proposal. There's no reason to take out the existing comment system from WP. It works! The option to disable comments or easily use something like Disqus seems like a fine idea but if you're hosting your own blog, there's a chance you'll want to host your own comments, too.
tripzilch 14y ago
Exactly. Comments were the thing that separated blogs from "well-updated homepage" in the first place. While I can see the author's point that WordPress somewhat lost its roots as a blogging platform, if you get rid of commenting, you're also losing those roots, in a different way. For me, Disqus is not really an option. It feels bloated and loads slow, and I've lost comments to its system many times, often because only after I typed the whole comment it let me know I needed to sign up, and sometimes that didn't work (I don't have Facebook, don't want to sign up with GMail or Twitter, maybe you get a throwaway email if you ask nicely). And then, something goes wrong during the signup procedure, and because the whole thing is made out of dynamic Javascript my post has disappeared and does no longer exist in my browser history forms either.
dkuntz2 14y ago
What do you mean you can't make a blog without comments? Definitionally a blog is a web log, or an online journal. There is no requirement that a blog have comments. Dustin Curtis' Svbtle is a recent blogging platform without comments, Jekyll and its brethren of blog-aware static-site generators are also without comments (unless the publisher adds them using an external service). Nobody needs comments, and there are many good reasons not to have comments on a blog, ranging from the fact that it removes the ability for people to impulsively write a negative comment for no reason other than to be negative to reducing server and database load.

jfmercer 14y ago

I would support this (that is, contribute code) if it wasn't written in PHP. Ruby, Python, Perl, node . . . anything but PHP.

hevyw8 14y ago

I was just about to poll my friends about a blogging platform in between Tumblr and Wordpress. Wordpress for my purposes has become analogous of iTunes.

pjbrunet 14y ago

I created a custom blog platform from scratch, a real one ;-) I was thinking about releasing it but got busy with other projects. You can see a sample post here: http://tomakefast.com/google-not-paying-publishers-for-rich-media-interactions-5239 http://tomakefast.com/google-not-paying-publishers-for-rich-... For comments, IntenseDebate. The backend is just four tables: options, posts, categories & feeds. (Yes, it aggregates feeds too.) Index.php does all the front-end work, another php file for the AJAX server, 4 more php files for the backend pages. Basically, interact with the database using AJAX datagrids. I can edit the blog without clicking Publish ;-)

mehulkar 14y ago

You should change "Less Options" to "Fewer Options". It's one of those things that if you know the difference, you can't stop noticing it everywhere.

forgotAgain 14y ago

I have this great idea for a really cool new product. It shouldn't take a good coder more than a couple of days. Contact me if your interested.

__david__ 14y ago
What a pointlessly snarky comment. I didn't see anything in the post that implied that the task was easy or that he was underestimating the work. He seemed to know the product, and to have even been involved with it directly at some point in time.

nickporter 14y ago

I really like the image drag and drop in the markdown editor!

malandrew 14y ago

Why is the title and the first three paragraphs an image instead of selectable text?

BUGHUNTER 14y ago

The most important thing would be a really good extension system - the wordpress plugin system is so massively broken and there are so many bad plugins - this crap must be sorted out - but it is a good place to study how to produce bad code. Extensibility is the key factor for any modern web framework / language / system. Also Wordpress is last-century with deployment options - there are no (built in) options for deployment and a smooth upgrade process including backups and optional rollbacks. The "automatic updates" claim by WP is btw. a good example for the limiting view of marketing jargon and how technical terms can be abused and this way educating millions of flies to eat tthe wrong food. Upgrade without rollback of course does not make sense and is no way "automatic". Please, if you build a new system, study modern web frameworks before and please do NOT use PHP.

jgv 14y ago

why is this web page a series of images?

mokash 14y ago

A lot of people are saying that you can't really make any significant changes because that would make a lot of plugins and themes incompatible with it. Well I say, keep Wordpress as it is but create a new version and invite some of the most popular theme and plugin authors to create their most popular themes and plugins for it before 'Ghost' goes out to the masses. Once people see how great it is, others will follow. I personally think this is a really good idea however, I wouldn't remove the comment system. I'd like Wordpress to be more flexible than it already is. I see websites like The Verge and Polygon, how they have different styles for different kinds of posts. They create beautiful reviews, very magazine-esque, how it's supposed to be. Giving this amount of control the users would allow authors to be a lot more creative and create even more beautiful and better websites than ever before.

kushti 14y ago

How much money you got for Macbook ads? They are annoying. And having nothing common with blogging platform idea.

webwanderings 14y ago

You should also develop a seamless and easy way to migrate blogs off of Wordpress and/or Wordpress.com. I also agree that they are taking WP to do too much and if you look at the history, it all seems like trying to keep up with the popular trends everywhere.

snotrockets 14y ago

A suggested fork of Wordpress (but not GPLed like Wordpress,) that requires giving external entities control of the comments on your blog, and with nothing but a few mockups in Photoshop to show for? I'm guessing all the 477 points came from those looking at the pretty pictures but ignoring the text (two extra points could have been awarded by the author and his SO.)

LittleBuddha87 14y ago

a really nice idea! I love it! I have in january next year time is there a repository where i can fork and work on it?