10 ms·

Our Director of Engineering on the new Wired.com

104 points by altern8 12y ago

thesystemis 12y ago
of note -- new yorker also transitioned to a wordpress backed system recently: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/business/media/the-new-yorker-alters-its-online-strategy.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/business/media/the-new-yor...
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  Whoa, did they use the same developers? The sites look very alike. The top navigation, squared layout, lots of white space, etc. Maybe this is the current design fad. Can't say I'm in love with it. I think all the spacing and heavy use of white space tries to mimick a print-like look, but on a screen just looks inefficient and bloaty. I like how Ars Technica handles their layout. Its dense, not overly white, column based, and with a nice background gradient that keeps all that white at bay.
- nashashmi 12y ago
  If you were to look at all those times that PHP is cursed either for its speed or programming or something else, I am surprised these big websites are still investing in something so buggy. Btw, I'm a PHP developer.
  - falcolas 12y ago
    Throw enough caching at a speed problem, and the speed problem effectively goes away. This is why the terms "Varnish" and "fcgi_cache" are so well associated with WordPress installs.
    - matthewmacleod 12y ago
      I'm not sure I agree with this — it just becomes much more complex and harder to debug!
      - falcolas 12y ago
        You are absolutely correct - caching solves the apparent speed problem to the end user, not the underlying cause of the speed problem. That said, solving the apparent speed problem for the end user is frequently enough.
  - krapp 12y ago
    As a PHP developer who has worked on several Wordpress installs as a freelancer, I can assure you companies don't invest in Wordpress because they're interested in security or speed, but so they can pay as little for the development and maintenance as possible.
    - hullo 12y ago
      WordPress is also very popular among content folks, on account of its well, content management features. Not to mention the strength of the editor, and easy extensibility. You could tap away in your terminal for a year making the new and best node.js or Go editor and by the time you were done you wouldn't be close, and WP would have moved the goalposts again. And let's say you were successful and had created a great content management system. Then you'd have to train your editors and your social media folks and they'd STILL hate it and quit and you'd have to train a new batch of editors, except, oh, you just got the opportunity to work for a company that doesn't make you spend a year re-implementing a blog from scratch and jumped on it, and now nobody knows how to get the website to let them embed a Vine? Man we should have just gone with Wordpress.
      - aikah 12y ago
        > Not to mention the strength of the editor Please, Wordpress content editor is nothing special from a UX stand point. Clients are just used to it,that's why clients ask for Wordpress.
        hullo 12y ago
        Well, I personally don't want a "special" UX in my editor. In any case just about every WP point upgrade has brought editor enhancements, so if you haven't used it recently you won't have a good basis of comparison. (e.g. 8.1 with distraction free mode – not for me personally but I've seen writers oooh over it.)
jfc 12y ago
As a developer who spends 90% of my time on WordPress, I'm really glad to read about this. WordPress is a great way to organize content on the web and has a robust developer community. It's always improving. Love it!
stevesearer 12y ago
I wonder if they are building their own "longform feature article builder" or if they'll be using something like the Aesop Story Engine Wordpress plugin.
nodata 12y ago
How did they harden it? Anyone know?
- josefresco 12y ago
  Good question - the wp-login.pp is accessible, however that doesn't say too much: https://www.wired.com/wp-login.php https://www.wired.com/wp-login.php They left this up: https://www.wired.com/readme.html https://www.wired.com/readme.html - But again, now too telling. Site does not handle being secure: https://www.wired.com/ https://www.wired.com/ I would imagine most of the "hardening" is on the server level, and not the basic level WP security that most webmasters usually encounter.
  - nodata 12y ago
    But server level hardening to prevent a defacement?
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 12y ago
    They are forcing SSL for /wp-login.php, though. Better than nothing as I'm sure Wired staff are logging in to this system from all over the place. Would be interesting to know more about how an article gets from written to published. Do the writers draft in WP and then have editors review it?
- skywhopper 12y ago
  I have no inside information, but there's a lot of things you could do by simply avoiding the built-in commenting system, and exposing the admin tools only to an internal network. You can pretty aggressively prune down the Wordpress install footprint/attack surface on your public-facing servers if you are willing to do some minor patching. Not to mention, a reverse-proxy layer in front of Wordpress can let you filter out the most obvious attacks and block lots of potential ones without touching the code itself.
  - at-fates-hands 12y ago
    You might add in there testing your plugins as well. Pretty much all of the WP security warnings are due to vulnerable plugins people are using without testing and leaving themselves exposed.
nashashmi 12y ago
I never realized there would be so much junk to haul through when trying to upgrade websites to these modern interfaces. It makes me wonder if this problem of really bad code is widespread in the industry or just among amateur web developers.
- gk1 12y ago
  Rome wasn't built in a day. Any product that's been around for 10+ years accumulates a lot of "junk." The thing is, it wasn't always junk. Eight years ago it was the best thing, it just hasn't been updated since then (aside from patches and bug fixes, as mentioned in the article).
tedunangst 12y ago
Where does the "12 databases" in the HN title come from? Neither 12 (twelve) nor database appears in the article.
- abluecloud 12y ago
  Not sure, but it does say: > when we migrated 17 active WIRED blogs into a single WordPress install
- faitswulff 12y ago
  It comes from this tweet: https://twitter.com/MarcusWohlsen/status/572229443751583744 https://twitter.com/MarcusWohlsen/status/572229443751583744
- lucb1e 12y ago
  For those who came here later, the original title read: > Wired merges 100k posts, 12 databases, and 17 blogs into 1 WordPress install
- mapgrep 12y ago
  From accompanying article by the editor of WIRED: "When I took over as editor in chief in 2012, WIRED had an archive of more than 100,000 stories. That’s good! But they were spread out over -->more than a dozen<-- different databases, sections, and homepages tenuously connected by virtual duct tape and chewing gum. " http://www.wired.com/2015/03/our-new-site/ http://www.wired.com/2015/03/our-new-site/
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
jacquesm 12y ago
On this page at the bottom there is a bug in the rendering of the boxes with other articles, the word 'newsletter' partially overlaps the box next to it (firefox). http://www.wired.com/2015/02/ellen-paos-lawyer-says-performance-reviews-changed-kleiner-lawsuit/ http://www.wired.com/2015/02/ellen-paos-lawyer-says-performa...
ebbv 12y ago
Here's a talk from WordCamp 2014 about (at least part of) this: https://wordpress.tv/2014/11/01/kathleen-vignos-migrating-17-wp-blogs-on-wired-com-into-one-wordpress-install/ https://wordpress.tv/2014/11/01/kathleen-vignos-migrating-17...
gdulli 12y ago
I'm having a vision of their CTO reading an article about horizontal scalability and his face starts getting red.
- TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
  They don't have a lot of data to serve, though, I imagine. You can store a lot of magazine and blog articles in 64GB of server memory. I don't think they have the kind of scaling problems that more social and peer-to-peer applications have. I could be wrong though. Still it seems they wouldn't have chosen Word Press, unless they really wanted some of the editorial and journalism-focused plugins and features. Some organizations swear by that stuff, and the writers and editors get used to those features. We might not interact with the features that the writers and editors love. So, yeah, though Wordpress is a nightmare, it might still be the best choice for Wired. If I was starting a blog with a community of writers, I might actually just use Google docs for collaborative editing, and then have some sort of publication tool that pushes from Google docs to a more streamlined custom back-end (probably written in Go since I've had a good experience with it so far). But this is just a naive opinion of mine, based on having absolutely no experience with actual journalism and publishing. I imagine I would soon discover many disastrous aspects of my harebrained architecture.
- jdub 12y ago
  ... because you think WordPress doesn't scale horizontally? That's... look, you should probably ask your doctor about WordPress.com. Or any reasonably large WordPress site.
  - gdulli 12y ago
    Scaling web servers is easy but there are limits on what a single database instance can support that Wordpress won't address and having multiple sites on multiple database instances is a simple, desirable solution.
    - nacin 12y ago
      WordPress works great sharded and/or replicated across databases, servers, even datacenters. This is what WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and pretty much any major WordPress site uses: https://wordpress.org/plugins/hyperdb/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/hyperdb/.
1123581321 12y ago
Some problems with the subscribe CTA in the sidebar (https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/wired/93911?source=Failsafe&pos_name=AMS_WIR_DESKTOP_FAILSAFE https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/wired/93911?source=Fai...) * The Customer Service link is broken. * It doesn't say what you'll pay after the initial $5. * It doesn't explain the GQ promotion. Is it 5 issues, $5 for 6, something else? Also, it would be re-assuring to see the to-be-billed amount near the Subscribe button. Because of the other issues on the page, I don't quite trust the header which is just an image made by a designer. I was interested enough to click but too unsure to follow through, so hopefully someone from Wired/Conde will see this and fix some of these issues.
- hullo 12y ago
  The full year subscription price does appear to have been completely left off the new site. Hiding the actual price probably tested well?
  - 1123581321 12y ago
    To be fair to Wired, I have a good idea what a magazine subscription should cost. :) I just think they haven't considered that hiding the price and agreement on a payment form signals an unintended negative impression.
mtbcoder 12y ago
I don't mean to be snarky, but is there something terribly interesting going on here? The only bit that seemed somewhat interesting was the "AI page curation" tool, but they hardly touched on that other than to mention that it was a Grails application, which was then ported to CakePHP, which was then ported to be a WP plugin.
- MangoDiesel 12y ago
  I agree. This all seems fairly basic, and from clicking through the site for 15 secs I was able to find a lot of bugs. For example, when reading the linked blog post, the social media bar scrolls and then re-anchors to its spot on the page on chrome 40.0. Reading through the other comments it sounds like there are many bugs throughout. The Grails app that is now Cake PHP is just a tool to aggregate content from other sources and then post it to wired.com site? And it was previously built and maintained by a single developer? Sounds like a basic tool.
- nodata 12y ago
  Yes. They didn't suffer from Not Invented Here. Good for them!
josefresco 12y ago
Some more information for the curious: http://builtwith.com/wired.com http://builtwith.com/wired.com Their theme is called "Phoenix". Being a "small time" WordPress developer I'm always fascinated by "big media" implementations of WordPress, and their decided upon hosting/server setup. Can't say I'm thrilled with the new Wired.com design (those category icons...ouch), but it's always been somewhat of an ugly duckling, and I'm happy to see they're still taking changes.
- tunap 12y ago
  In a world where end-user nav is an afterthought and 'flat' is being slapped onto every site/app/ui despite readability or contrast issues, I'd say Wired's fugly as hell theme is par for the course. Perhaps even...an improvement.
- dudurocha 12y ago
  How you discovered the theme? Tried searching for "Phoenix" on the page you linked but could not find.
  - ebilgenius 12y ago
    In the source you can see that it links to /wp-content/themes/Phoenix/
falcolas 12y ago
As someone who has just spent the last two weeks attempting to secure and standardize a WordPress install, my sincerest condolences to Wired's system administrators. WordPress has achieved the complexity promised by Zawinski's Law, and is a true nightmare to attempt to secure. Not only do you have software which writes its own full URLs (including the scheme), you have software which checks and optionally triggers a built-in cron with every request, one PHP file which rules them all, an average of four cookies for every visit (which messes with some caching attempts), a mish-mash of JS and CSS files, static assets spread throughout the wordpress base, every plugin, and every theme, executable PHP in the DB... It can even install its own plugins, if you give it the credentials to FTP to the server which hosts it. I'm glad this project is nearing its completion. The promises made by Wordpress to content creators is backed by the nightmares of system administrators. Zawinski's Law: “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” EDIT: Dear WordPress Sysadmins: You still have some work to do in securing your site. For example, I can tell just from your headers that you're running on Apache 2.4.6, on PHP 5.6.6, and using Varnish 4 as your caching mechanism from your somewhat verbose headers. Good luck!
- skywhopper 12y ago
  Everything you say about Wordpress is totally true in my experience. But I expect this team is in a much better position than most Wordpress hosts in terms of security potential. For the scale of someone like Wired, I expect they have an internal network they can restrict the administrative interface to. And I would also presume they are doing some aggressive caching to a CDN or to some sort of dedicated public-facing servers that. There's no reason to even worry about letting Wordpress itself respond directly to user requests. Or if they do, they can trim out the riskiest bits of code--no reason to run a vanilla install. This sort of separation would pretty much negate the standard issues with Wordpress's security.
  - br-g 12y ago
    Nope: http://wired.com/wp-admin http://wired.com/wp-admin
skywhopper 12y ago
Having only recently begun to poke around at the Wordpress Multi-Site database layout thanks to having to take over responsibility for an 8000+ blog morass of an install, I can say that the hacky way in which Wordpress achieved multi-site capability would actually make this transition relatively simple. Other than ensuring user IDs in the database were in sync, the core blog tables themselves just need to be imported with slightly tweaked names, since each sub-blog in multi-site WP has its own independent set of tables.
sixQuarks 12y ago
Does anyone else think their new design is terrible? The fonts are hard to read. I hate to be that guy, but I liked the old site better.
- jebus989 12y ago
  Post title is particularly horrible IMO, Ambroise STD Francois with uppercase transform ugh.
- username223 12y ago
  I actually like the fonts and clean-ish appearance, but just like so many others, they broke page-down with their big, fat, floating top div. There's apparently a way to fix it with JavaScript -- nytimes.com eventually got it right -- but I wish people would stop adding these things.
- cnp 12y ago
  I'm in literal shock over the fonts. I've never seen something so high-profile so badly designed, typographically. Isn't there some kind of rule somewhere that says 4 fonts max? On the homepage there are seven different fonts! And then you click into a link and blammo, you're hit with this crazy antique looking thing that looks like porcelain shaped words, but with far less class. Is this a technology site or a site on fine cigars and expensive yachts? Its unreadable and seriously needs to be addressed. Just some dire constructive crit for such a great publication. This will turn away users, if only subconsciously.
- sosborn 12y ago
  Yeah, the typography on this is pretty bad (way too many fonts), but the thing that really strikes me is how generic the site looks. The old design was very identifiable as "Wired", this new design looks like any other news aggregator.
Immortalin 12y ago
One of the main reason I am using Drupal and not WordPress is that the WordPress community seem to prefer more paid "premium" stuff over FOSS ones. Take Drupal Commerce for example, you have access to all of the plugins but you only need to pay for support. For wordpress, it's a completely different story, either pay for a full version of woocommerce with all the bells and whistles, or stick with using the half-baked "basic" version, lacking crucial features. While I understand the need for monetization, for startups and new companies this model is very pricey compared to the Drupal one.
- aram 12y ago
  Good points; however, this is not only important for startups and new companies, but for the community itself. Drupal has much stronger community than WordPress & Joomla for example, and I think this has to do with keeping all extensions in one place and discouraging premium ones. This way all developers can get whatever they need, but because of Drupal's "complexity", you there is way less crappy code written by people who are just passing by, as in WP/Joomla.
  - MichaelTieso 12y ago
    This seems opinion based. I'd argue WordPress has a much stronger community.
    - Jgrubb 12y ago
      This also seems opinion based. I'd argue Drupal has a much stronger community ;)
      - mikeschinkel 12y ago
        And yours seems opinion based. I'd argue WordPress has a much stronger community in part because is has around 10x more community members. :-p
    - nacho2sweet 12y ago
      I would agree. I work in a large organization that shoves all websites into drupal, and provides our non-technical clients with solutions they don't like using. The Drupal pumpers I always feel are just highly opinionated techno-files, and somewhat insufferable to debate with. I think most are scared of learning new technologies, and none of their opinions are based on developing solutions and workflows that easy to use for their clients or how people surf the web (google it). All the drupal modules are 5 years old, have 30,000 installs, and don't actually do anything nicely that you want them to do. Go find a drupal module that is similar to Yoast SEO. Go find a great responsive template to base your sites design on for that matter. Setup a author-editor-publish workflow that someone who only knows how to use facebook and gmail can work with. Drupal is terrible for clients to manage.
pavlov 12y ago
So wait, Wired's website isn't called hotwired.com anymore? Huh. I guess it's been like 15 years, but I just never noticed.
jbb555 12y ago
"mobile-first"? Never mind then
- LukeB_UK 12y ago
  What's wrong with mobile first? It makes complete sense.
bmiller 12y ago
FYI if your browser zoom isn't the default 100% all the graphics on the page have their sides clipped.... At first I thought the publisher had changed their name to just "WIRE" as part of a rebranding.
kybernetyk 12y ago
I stopped reading wired since they always redirect me to the local wired.de whenever I try to read their US version. Which is really annoying.
pacofvf 12y ago
I wish they had a section where you can see all the articles in chronological order (newer to older). they made a latest news section but it doesn't look ordered.
data_spy 12y ago
Wired.com also upped their ads from 3 to 5 on their homepage. Also page design is to make squares exactly match high value ad sizes. Almost as desperate as Pandora's two ads in a row that started happening the past few months
artimaeis 12y ago
I love how much faster the new site feels. Seems like before I'd load it up and some content would take 30+ seconds to load but everything I touch on the page all but leaps out to respond to my click. It's pretty wonderful and a welcome change. Not sure if I like the idea of a dynamic news feed. It's one of my least favorite "features" of Facebook given that I have a harder time filtering what I have or haven't read. Seems to be the way the modern web is heading though. At least looking forward to see how Wired's implementation of it works out.
sjthompson 12y ago
I'm seeing <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" /> in the source of every page...
cnp 12y ago
Please excuse me, but WTF (I mean -- really -- WTF) is up with that headline font? It is totally unreadable and tacky. Did someone hack the site?
- msutherl 12y ago
  Was about to post the same thing. It contrasts with everything else on the website in every way. I'm actually really curious what the rationale could possibly be.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - cnp 12y ago
    Its blowing my mind right now how many reviewers let this pass without a fight
    - seanalltogether 12y ago
      It is weird since the two main fonts seem to be fighting with each other. The main wired font has always been blocky/techno/sci-fi, and this new headline font is trying to look like a newspaper font from the 1920s.
      - msutherl 12y ago
        Nah, it's even worse – that typeface is based on didones from the 1790s!
        cnp 12y ago
        hahahahaha yeah....
kmz 12y ago
Well they definitely seem to server ad's blazingly fast.

104 points by altern8 12y ago

of note -- new yorker also transitioned to a wordpress backed system recently: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/business/media/the-new-yorker-alters-its-online-strategy.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/business/media/the-new-yor...

drzaiusapelord 12y ago
Whoa, did they use the same developers? The sites look very alike. The top navigation, squared layout, lots of white space, etc. Maybe this is the current design fad. Can't say I'm in love with it. I think all the spacing and heavy use of white space tries to mimick a print-like look, but on a screen just looks inefficient and bloaty. I like how Ars Technica handles their layout. Its dense, not overly white, column based, and with a nice background gradient that keeps all that white at bay.
nashashmi 12y ago
If you were to look at all those times that PHP is cursed either for its speed or programming or something else, I am surprised these big websites are still investing in something so buggy. Btw, I'm a PHP developer.
- falcolas 12y ago
  Throw enough caching at a speed problem, and the speed problem effectively goes away. This is why the terms "Varnish" and "fcgi_cache" are so well associated with WordPress installs.
  - matthewmacleod 12y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with this — it just becomes much more complex and harder to debug!
    - falcolas 12y ago
      You are absolutely correct - caching solves the apparent speed problem to the end user, not the underlying cause of the speed problem. That said, solving the apparent speed problem for the end user is frequently enough.
- krapp 12y ago
  As a PHP developer who has worked on several Wordpress installs as a freelancer, I can assure you companies don't invest in Wordpress because they're interested in security or speed, but so they can pay as little for the development and maintenance as possible.
  - hullo 12y ago
    WordPress is also very popular among content folks, on account of its well, content management features. Not to mention the strength of the editor, and easy extensibility. You could tap away in your terminal for a year making the new and best node.js or Go editor and by the time you were done you wouldn't be close, and WP would have moved the goalposts again. And let's say you were successful and had created a great content management system. Then you'd have to train your editors and your social media folks and they'd STILL hate it and quit and you'd have to train a new batch of editors, except, oh, you just got the opportunity to work for a company that doesn't make you spend a year re-implementing a blog from scratch and jumped on it, and now nobody knows how to get the website to let them embed a Vine? Man we should have just gone with Wordpress.
    - aikah 12y ago
      > Not to mention the strength of the editor Please, Wordpress content editor is nothing special from a UX stand point. Clients are just used to it,that's why clients ask for Wordpress.
      - hullo 12y ago
        Well, I personally don't want a "special" UX in my editor. In any case just about every WP point upgrade has brought editor enhancements, so if you haven't used it recently you won't have a good basis of comparison. (e.g. 8.1 with distraction free mode – not for me personally but I've seen writers oooh over it.)

jfc 12y ago

As a developer who spends 90% of my time on WordPress, I'm really glad to read about this. WordPress is a great way to organize content on the web and has a robust developer community. It's always improving. Love it!

stevesearer 12y ago

I wonder if they are building their own "longform feature article builder" or if they'll be using something like the Aesop Story Engine Wordpress plugin.

nodata 12y ago

How did they harden it? Anyone know?

josefresco 12y ago
Good question - the wp-login.pp is accessible, however that doesn't say too much: https://www.wired.com/wp-login.php https://www.wired.com/wp-login.php They left this up: https://www.wired.com/readme.html https://www.wired.com/readme.html - But again, now too telling. Site does not handle being secure: https://www.wired.com/ https://www.wired.com/ I would imagine most of the "hardening" is on the server level, and not the basic level WP security that most webmasters usually encounter.
- nodata 12y ago
  But server level hardening to prevent a defacement?
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 12y ago
  They are forcing SSL for /wp-login.php, though. Better than nothing as I'm sure Wired staff are logging in to this system from all over the place. Would be interesting to know more about how an article gets from written to published. Do the writers draft in WP and then have editors review it?
skywhopper 12y ago
I have no inside information, but there's a lot of things you could do by simply avoiding the built-in commenting system, and exposing the admin tools only to an internal network. You can pretty aggressively prune down the Wordpress install footprint/attack surface on your public-facing servers if you are willing to do some minor patching. Not to mention, a reverse-proxy layer in front of Wordpress can let you filter out the most obvious attacks and block lots of potential ones without touching the code itself.
- at-fates-hands 12y ago
  You might add in there testing your plugins as well. Pretty much all of the WP security warnings are due to vulnerable plugins people are using without testing and leaving themselves exposed.

nashashmi 12y ago

I never realized there would be so much junk to haul through when trying to upgrade websites to these modern interfaces. It makes me wonder if this problem of really bad code is widespread in the industry or just among amateur web developers.

gk1 12y ago
Rome wasn't built in a day. Any product that's been around for 10+ years accumulates a lot of "junk." The thing is, it wasn't always junk. Eight years ago it was the best thing, it just hasn't been updated since then (aside from patches and bug fixes, as mentioned in the article).

tedunangst 12y ago

Where does the "12 databases" in the HN title come from? Neither 12 (twelve) nor database appears in the article.

abluecloud 12y ago
Not sure, but it does say: > when we migrated 17 active WIRED blogs into a single WordPress install
faitswulff 12y ago
It comes from this tweet: https://twitter.com/MarcusWohlsen/status/572229443751583744 https://twitter.com/MarcusWohlsen/status/572229443751583744
lucb1e 12y ago
For those who came here later, the original title read: > Wired merges 100k posts, 12 databases, and 17 blogs into 1 WordPress install
mapgrep 12y ago
From accompanying article by the editor of WIRED: "When I took over as editor in chief in 2012, WIRED had an archive of more than 100,000 stories. That’s good! But they were spread out over -->more than a dozen<-- different databases, sections, and homepages tenuously connected by virtual duct tape and chewing gum. " http://www.wired.com/2015/03/our-new-site/ http://www.wired.com/2015/03/our-new-site/
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

jacquesm 12y ago

On this page at the bottom there is a bug in the rendering of the boxes with other articles, the word 'newsletter' partially overlaps the box next to it (firefox). http://www.wired.com/2015/02/ellen-paos-lawyer-says-performance-reviews-changed-kleiner-lawsuit/ http://www.wired.com/2015/02/ellen-paos-lawyer-says-performa...

ebbv 12y ago

Here's a talk from WordCamp 2014 about (at least part of) this: https://wordpress.tv/2014/11/01/kathleen-vignos-migrating-17-wp-blogs-on-wired-com-into-one-wordpress-install/ https://wordpress.tv/2014/11/01/kathleen-vignos-migrating-17...

gdulli 12y ago

I'm having a vision of their CTO reading an article about horizontal scalability and his face starts getting red.

TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
They don't have a lot of data to serve, though, I imagine. You can store a lot of magazine and blog articles in 64GB of server memory. I don't think they have the kind of scaling problems that more social and peer-to-peer applications have. I could be wrong though. Still it seems they wouldn't have chosen Word Press, unless they really wanted some of the editorial and journalism-focused plugins and features. Some organizations swear by that stuff, and the writers and editors get used to those features. We might not interact with the features that the writers and editors love. So, yeah, though Wordpress is a nightmare, it might still be the best choice for Wired. If I was starting a blog with a community of writers, I might actually just use Google docs for collaborative editing, and then have some sort of publication tool that pushes from Google docs to a more streamlined custom back-end (probably written in Go since I've had a good experience with it so far). But this is just a naive opinion of mine, based on having absolutely no experience with actual journalism and publishing. I imagine I would soon discover many disastrous aspects of my harebrained architecture.
jdub 12y ago
... because you think WordPress doesn't scale horizontally? That's... look, you should probably ask your doctor about WordPress.com. Or any reasonably large WordPress site.
- gdulli 12y ago
  Scaling web servers is easy but there are limits on what a single database instance can support that Wordpress won't address and having multiple sites on multiple database instances is a simple, desirable solution.
  - nacin 12y ago
    WordPress works great sharded and/or replicated across databases, servers, even datacenters. This is what WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and pretty much any major WordPress site uses: https://wordpress.org/plugins/hyperdb/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/hyperdb/.

1123581321 12y ago

Some problems with the subscribe CTA in the sidebar (https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/wired/93911?source=Failsafe&pos_name=AMS_WIR_DESKTOP_FAILSAFE https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/wired/93911?source=Fai...) * The Customer Service link is broken. * It doesn't say what you'll pay after the initial $5. * It doesn't explain the GQ promotion. Is it 5 issues, $5 for 6, something else? Also, it would be re-assuring to see the to-be-billed amount near the Subscribe button. Because of the other issues on the page, I don't quite trust the header which is just an image made by a designer. I was interested enough to click but too unsure to follow through, so hopefully someone from Wired/Conde will see this and fix some of these issues.

hullo 12y ago
The full year subscription price does appear to have been completely left off the new site. Hiding the actual price probably tested well?
- 1123581321 12y ago
  To be fair to Wired, I have a good idea what a magazine subscription should cost. :) I just think they haven't considered that hiding the price and agreement on a payment form signals an unintended negative impression.

mtbcoder 12y ago

I don't mean to be snarky, but is there something terribly interesting going on here? The only bit that seemed somewhat interesting was the "AI page curation" tool, but they hardly touched on that other than to mention that it was a Grails application, which was then ported to CakePHP, which was then ported to be a WP plugin.

MangoDiesel 12y ago
I agree. This all seems fairly basic, and from clicking through the site for 15 secs I was able to find a lot of bugs. For example, when reading the linked blog post, the social media bar scrolls and then re-anchors to its spot on the page on chrome 40.0. Reading through the other comments it sounds like there are many bugs throughout. The Grails app that is now Cake PHP is just a tool to aggregate content from other sources and then post it to wired.com site? And it was previously built and maintained by a single developer? Sounds like a basic tool.
nodata 12y ago
Yes. They didn't suffer from Not Invented Here. Good for them!

josefresco 12y ago

Some more information for the curious: http://builtwith.com/wired.com http://builtwith.com/wired.com Their theme is called "Phoenix". Being a "small time" WordPress developer I'm always fascinated by "big media" implementations of WordPress, and their decided upon hosting/server setup. Can't say I'm thrilled with the new Wired.com design (those category icons...ouch), but it's always been somewhat of an ugly duckling, and I'm happy to see they're still taking changes.

tunap 12y ago
In a world where end-user nav is an afterthought and 'flat' is being slapped onto every site/app/ui despite readability or contrast issues, I'd say Wired's fugly as hell theme is par for the course. Perhaps even...an improvement.
dudurocha 12y ago
How you discovered the theme? Tried searching for "Phoenix" on the page you linked but could not find.
- ebilgenius 12y ago
  In the source you can see that it links to /wp-content/themes/Phoenix/

falcolas 12y ago

As someone who has just spent the last two weeks attempting to secure and standardize a WordPress install, my sincerest condolences to Wired's system administrators. WordPress has achieved the complexity promised by Zawinski's Law, and is a true nightmare to attempt to secure. Not only do you have software which writes its own full URLs (including the scheme), you have software which checks and optionally triggers a built-in cron with every request, one PHP file which rules them all, an average of four cookies for every visit (which messes with some caching attempts), a mish-mash of JS and CSS files, static assets spread throughout the wordpress base, every plugin, and every theme, executable PHP in the DB... It can even install its own plugins, if you give it the credentials to FTP to the server which hosts it. I'm glad this project is nearing its completion. The promises made by Wordpress to content creators is backed by the nightmares of system administrators. Zawinski's Law: “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” EDIT: Dear WordPress Sysadmins: You still have some work to do in securing your site. For example, I can tell just from your headers that you're running on Apache 2.4.6, on PHP 5.6.6, and using Varnish 4 as your caching mechanism from your somewhat verbose headers. Good luck!

skywhopper 12y ago
Everything you say about Wordpress is totally true in my experience. But I expect this team is in a much better position than most Wordpress hosts in terms of security potential. For the scale of someone like Wired, I expect they have an internal network they can restrict the administrative interface to. And I would also presume they are doing some aggressive caching to a CDN or to some sort of dedicated public-facing servers that. There's no reason to even worry about letting Wordpress itself respond directly to user requests. Or if they do, they can trim out the riskiest bits of code--no reason to run a vanilla install. This sort of separation would pretty much negate the standard issues with Wordpress's security.
- br-g 12y ago
  Nope: http://wired.com/wp-admin http://wired.com/wp-admin

skywhopper 12y ago

Having only recently begun to poke around at the Wordpress Multi-Site database layout thanks to having to take over responsibility for an 8000+ blog morass of an install, I can say that the hacky way in which Wordpress achieved multi-site capability would actually make this transition relatively simple. Other than ensuring user IDs in the database were in sync, the core blog tables themselves just need to be imported with slightly tweaked names, since each sub-blog in multi-site WP has its own independent set of tables.

sixQuarks 12y ago

Does anyone else think their new design is terrible? The fonts are hard to read. I hate to be that guy, but I liked the old site better.

jebus989 12y ago
Post title is particularly horrible IMO, Ambroise STD Francois with uppercase transform ugh.
username223 12y ago
I actually like the fonts and clean-ish appearance, but just like so many others, they broke page-down with their big, fat, floating top div. There's apparently a way to fix it with JavaScript -- nytimes.com eventually got it right -- but I wish people would stop adding these things.
cnp 12y ago
I'm in literal shock over the fonts. I've never seen something so high-profile so badly designed, typographically. Isn't there some kind of rule somewhere that says 4 fonts max? On the homepage there are seven different fonts! And then you click into a link and blammo, you're hit with this crazy antique looking thing that looks like porcelain shaped words, but with far less class. Is this a technology site or a site on fine cigars and expensive yachts? Its unreadable and seriously needs to be addressed. Just some dire constructive crit for such a great publication. This will turn away users, if only subconsciously.
sosborn 12y ago
Yeah, the typography on this is pretty bad (way too many fonts), but the thing that really strikes me is how generic the site looks. The old design was very identifiable as "Wired", this new design looks like any other news aggregator.

Immortalin 12y ago

One of the main reason I am using Drupal and not WordPress is that the WordPress community seem to prefer more paid "premium" stuff over FOSS ones. Take Drupal Commerce for example, you have access to all of the plugins but you only need to pay for support. For wordpress, it's a completely different story, either pay for a full version of woocommerce with all the bells and whistles, or stick with using the half-baked "basic" version, lacking crucial features. While I understand the need for monetization, for startups and new companies this model is very pricey compared to the Drupal one.

aram 12y ago
Good points; however, this is not only important for startups and new companies, but for the community itself. Drupal has much stronger community than WordPress & Joomla for example, and I think this has to do with keeping all extensions in one place and discouraging premium ones. This way all developers can get whatever they need, but because of Drupal's "complexity", you there is way less crappy code written by people who are just passing by, as in WP/Joomla.
- MichaelTieso 12y ago
  This seems opinion based. I'd argue WordPress has a much stronger community.
  - Jgrubb 12y ago
    This also seems opinion based. I'd argue Drupal has a much stronger community ;)
    - mikeschinkel 12y ago
      And yours seems opinion based. I'd argue WordPress has a much stronger community in part because is has around 10x more community members. :-p
  - nacho2sweet 12y ago
    I would agree. I work in a large organization that shoves all websites into drupal, and provides our non-technical clients with solutions they don't like using. The Drupal pumpers I always feel are just highly opinionated techno-files, and somewhat insufferable to debate with. I think most are scared of learning new technologies, and none of their opinions are based on developing solutions and workflows that easy to use for their clients or how people surf the web (google it). All the drupal modules are 5 years old, have 30,000 installs, and don't actually do anything nicely that you want them to do. Go find a drupal module that is similar to Yoast SEO. Go find a great responsive template to base your sites design on for that matter. Setup a author-editor-publish workflow that someone who only knows how to use facebook and gmail can work with. Drupal is terrible for clients to manage.

pavlov 12y ago

So wait, Wired's website isn't called hotwired.com anymore? Huh. I guess it's been like 15 years, but I just never noticed.

jbb555 12y ago

"mobile-first"? Never mind then

LukeB_UK 12y ago
What's wrong with mobile first? It makes complete sense.

bmiller 12y ago

FYI if your browser zoom isn't the default 100% all the graphics on the page have their sides clipped.... At first I thought the publisher had changed their name to just "WIRE" as part of a rebranding.

kybernetyk 12y ago

I stopped reading wired since they always redirect me to the local wired.de whenever I try to read their US version. Which is really annoying.

pacofvf 12y ago

I wish they had a section where you can see all the articles in chronological order (newer to older). they made a latest news section but it doesn't look ordered.

data_spy 12y ago

Wired.com also upped their ads from 3 to 5 on their homepage. Also page design is to make squares exactly match high value ad sizes. Almost as desperate as Pandora's two ads in a row that started happening the past few months

artimaeis 12y ago

I love how much faster the new site feels. Seems like before I'd load it up and some content would take 30+ seconds to load but everything I touch on the page all but leaps out to respond to my click. It's pretty wonderful and a welcome change. Not sure if I like the idea of a dynamic news feed. It's one of my least favorite "features" of Facebook given that I have a harder time filtering what I have or haven't read. Seems to be the way the modern web is heading though. At least looking forward to see how Wired's implementation of it works out.

sjthompson 12y ago

I'm seeing <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" /> in the source of every page...

cnp 12y ago

Please excuse me, but WTF (I mean -- really -- WTF) is up with that headline font? It is totally unreadable and tacky. Did someone hack the site?

msutherl 12y ago
Was about to post the same thing. It contrasts with everything else on the website in every way. I'm actually really curious what the rationale could possibly be.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- cnp 12y ago
  Its blowing my mind right now how many reviewers let this pass without a fight
  - seanalltogether 12y ago
    It is weird since the two main fonts seem to be fighting with each other. The main wired font has always been blocky/techno/sci-fi, and this new headline font is trying to look like a newspaper font from the 1920s.
    - msutherl 12y ago
      Nah, it's even worse – that typeface is based on didones from the 1790s!
      - cnp 12y ago
        hahahahaha yeah....

kmz 12y ago

Well they definitely seem to server ad's blazingly fast.