[HN Gopher] WordPress Is in Trouble
___________________________________________________________________
WordPress Is in Trouble
Author : ulrischa
Score : 482 points
Date : 2025-01-13 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (anderegg.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (anderegg.ca)
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Let's just rewrite the thing in Laravel, hook all the functions
| using RunKit7 (or a fork) to implement a plugin compatibility
| layer, and send the old codebase to the dumpster fire. WP Engine
| and other hosting agencies, it could be a matter of survival for
| you.
| bdcravens wrote:
| It's looking more and more like it's a matter of survival for
| the massive number of sites that run Wordpress but don't host
| with Wordpress.com.
| ge96 wrote:
| Isn't there a metric like 80% of the web is WP. Wonder who will
| be the new provider if WP does fold/problems affect running
| sites.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| I thought that was a statistic about PHP. Though WordPress is
| almost certainly a significant chunk of that.
|
| Some quick searching seems to indicate that the web is about
| 79% PHP, and that ~44% of websites are using WordPress.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Hopefully... geocities.
| paxys wrote:
| Nah, Wordpress themselves claimed 40% in 2021
| (https://wordpress.org/40-percent-of-web/).
|
| The big caveat of course is that wordpress being installed on a
| domain does not mean that entire domain is powered by
| wordpress. I'd bet for most of them it's just the
| landing/marketing pages and/or a blog section.
| pryelluw wrote:
| At this point, I'm planning to move away from Wordpress due to
| the instability and into a regular wiki based site. Unsure of
| which at the moment, maybe some suggestions? Prefer static file
| based rather than host a DB.
| nabaraz wrote:
| I moved to Azure free static hosting. Push a commit and
| automatically triggers a deployment via Github Actions.
|
| https://docs.github.com/en/actions/use-cases-and-examples/de...
| fullstop wrote:
| https://ghost.org/ perhaps?
| withinboredom wrote:
| ghost is worse than wp imho. Lots of sneaky affiliate links,
| and they only integrate stuff that does affiliate linking;
| the self-hosted version calls home as well.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| If you are hosting a blog then I highly recommend Astro.
| Kiala wrote:
| Statamic
| diggan wrote:
| Depends on your target user. If you want something really
| simple for developers, https://github.com/gollum/gollum is
| pretty neat (is what powers the Wiki system on GitHub), while
| if you want something simple for people who aren't developers,
| something like Mediawiki would fit better. Although Mediawiki
| requires a database, you can use SQLite (which is basically a
| file on disk as a DB) for it.
|
| Dokuwiki is also a neat old-school alternative that basically
| treats files on disk as articles/pages, so no (other) DB
| needed.
| wingmanjd wrote:
| GravCMS is a flat-file CMS (content is saved to markdown,
| making it quite portable if you decide it's not for you). There
| isn't wiki-functionality (auto-create pages that don't exist),
| however.
|
| I wrote an exporter from WP to Grav [1].
|
| [1] https://github.com/jgonyea/wp2grav_exporter
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| Hugo has been wonderful for me. I use it to host my portfolio
| website. Only thing I dislike is themes can be a pain to edit
| if you don't know where things are spread out in the source.
| esher wrote:
| PHP based static file CMS (w/o database) to render markdown on
| the fly:
|
| * Kirby: https://getkirby.com/ * Grav: https://getgrav.org/ *
| Statamic: https://statamic.com/
| stefanos82 wrote:
| For flat-file wiki-based websites, you can try dokuwiki [1]
| which is extremely convenient and of course quite fast for what
| it's made for.
|
| [1] https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Instability and WordPress have been related for a long time.
| Personally, I have found the last few years to be pretty good.
|
| If what you need do is a great fit for a static site, then that
| will be a much easier to deal with.
|
| For a majority of Wordpress use I am involved in a static site
| would not offer a majority of the features needed.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Instead of a wiki, why not a static site generator.
|
| I have used Pelican[1] for over a decade. Strongly recommend if
| you know Python. You don't _need_ to know Python, but in the
| off chance that one day in the future you want to write your
| own plugin...
|
| [1] https://getpelican.com/
| addedlovely wrote:
| Kirby has ticked the boxes for me, total control of the admin
| interface.
|
| Block fields like ACF flexible layouts. Modern and fast with
| total control of the frontend.
|
| Has been fun to switch and fast.
| xenodium wrote:
| I just launched a drag and drop service myself
| https://lmno.lol. Use your favorite text editor to edit your
| Markdown blog file.
|
| No tracking, adverts, paywalls, or bloat. I'm also bringing a
| little nostalgia back with ASCII art headers (optional of
| course).
|
| Here's my blog on it: https://lmno.lol/alvaro
|
| Wrote a bit about how I got to build my own service
| https://lmno.lol/alvaro/blogging-minus-the-yucky-bits-of-mod...
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > Mullenweg framed the account deactivations as giving people the
| push they need to get started [in forking WP]
|
| Ha. IDK buddy, be careful what you wish for.
| pluc wrote:
| Mullenweg is in trouble, WordPress is gonna be fine.
|
| https://gist.github.com/adrienne/aea9dd7ca19c8985157d9c42f7f...
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Without a canonical fork for the community (and crucially
| plugin authors) to rally around it'll be a bit like Linux
| distros without a shared executable format, making life
| difficult for everyone and making it harder to keep critical
| mass for any vendor.
| cm2012 wrote:
| A few folks with a lot of community rep could probably do a
| lot of good if they to threw support behind a new primary
| fork.
| pluc wrote:
| That's difficult to do, but time will tell. There are already
| established forks, there are obvious leaders, there are known
| mechanisms to go around wordpress.org... something at some
| point will pick up steam and that'll be that. Maybe it will
| be Mullenweg himself who will continue to dig his own grave,
| maybe it will be the lawsuit that will be the final nail in
| his coffin... who knows. But WordPress will be fine.
|
| And if it isn't, really, who cares. It's not a particularly
| well built or unique piece of software. Maybe it's time for
| something else.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I think it would basically take a tech giant going all-in
| (ie Amazon) and rallying other companies to get this fork
| into the Linux foundation or something.
| egypturnash wrote:
| matt please get your brain worms dealt with, thank you
|
| - someone who has been happily using wordpress for her site since
| about 2000
| gorkish wrote:
| Oh no who could have possibly forseen this .... mumble mumble
| karaterobot wrote:
| I've had a Wordpress blog for about 25 years. This makes me want
| to turn off automatic updates, since I'm worried he might just go
| nuclear and flip some sort of kill switch that bricks every blog,
| or push some ridiculous anti-Wordpress Engine banner to every
| installation. Of course, not keeping WP up to date is very risky
| as well.
|
| I'm not even insensitive to his position, even though I don't
| know full details. But, he's the one acting irrational in all
| this, so he's the one I'm most scared of.
| internetter wrote:
| Consider a static site. They cannot be hacked, they are cheaper
| to host, and once the files are generated they are immutable
| prepend wrote:
| They can certainly be hacked, just like any static site. Web
| servers have vulnerabilities.
|
| And the files can certainly be edited as they aren't
| immutable.
|
| They are less resource intensive and easier to maintain, but
| aren't immune.
|
| (Running mostly static sites converted from Wordpress sites,
| but also running 10 year old+ word press sites that haven't
| been changed in forever)
| RandomDistort wrote:
| You aren't wrong, but if you use Cloudflare Pages with a
| static site the only job you have to do for a static site
| is make sure your Cloudflare account is secure with 2fa
| etc. Cloudflare will handle the security of everything
| else.
|
| If you have Wordpress exposed to the internet, there's a
| lot more security stuff to deal with.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Good luck hacking an html file served through nginx.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| You're not wrong, but compromising a server that exposes
| nginx configured for static files, sshd, and nothing else
| is at least an order of mag or two harder. Probably no one
| is going to drop an nginx 0day on your blog.
| dustyharddrive wrote:
| And you can run one written in a memory-safe language,
| like Caddy.
| pier25 wrote:
| Even if it's remotely possible to hack Nginx... what's the
| motivation to hack a static site?
|
| There's no DB with juicy data and no compute to abuse for
| mining crypto or running DDOS attacks.
| arccy wrote:
| trick users into clicking malicious links, host ads, seo
| link farm, host other questionable content, or some
| people just like to deface websites
| mfkp wrote:
| Usually SEO spam link insertion and generic Viagra spam
| redirects...
| prepend wrote:
| Similar motivation as hacking a Wordpress site, putting
| seo spam out there.
|
| There's less payoff, but people still do it.
| pier25 wrote:
| yeah but the difficulty in hacking Nginx vs Wordpress
| must be orders of magnitude more difficult though
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| you can change the payload sent to users, static or not.
| If you serve javascript you're serving dynamic, runtime
| dependency injecting code.
| crowcroft wrote:
| The web server can be hacked so it serves something other
| than the static HTML you uploaded but there is no 'app' to
| hack, there's a whole class of problems that can happen on
| WordPress that can not happen with static sites.
|
| What would hacking an HTML file even mean.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I had a website got hacked when the FTP server running on
| the shared host got exploited. They added some malware
| injection code to the index.html file.
|
| After that I added a cron job that compared the hash of the
| index.html with a precomputed value. Didn't change often
| enough to be a hassle.
| CIPHERSTONE wrote:
| This 100%. Host on github and use ghpages and Jekyll with
| either github supported themes or a theme of your choice.
| daitangio wrote:
| With isso for comments!
| ptx wrote:
| What about using distro packages? That would insulate you from
| upstream suddenly turning malicious.
|
| I'm not sure if Debian's packages are kept up to date with
| security patches, though. The latest changes to the wordpress
| package[0] were in December 2022 and and May 2024.
|
| [0] https://metadata.ftp-
| master.debian.org/changelogs//main/w/wo...
| huijzer wrote:
| Hopefully many sites will switch to a static site generator like
| Hugo or Zola. Way lower costs, lower risk of being hacked (almost
| impossible actually), and a reliable backup thanks to Git.
|
| I'm running multiple static sites for years already and am very
| happy with it. It has been very reliable.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >switch to a static site generator like Hugo or Zola
|
| At that point just write your own HTML and never be beholden to
| some abstraction framework toolkit corporation cooperative ever
| again.
| hu3 wrote:
| Soon enough AI will write most of blog/marketing HTML.
| labster wrote:
| And then we can develop systems that save user prompts,
| automatically and dynamically regenerating page content as
| the AI models are updated.
| hu3 wrote:
| Add simple version control to keep history of changes.
|
| Slap some workflow/approval process.
|
| And you have a product!
| 9dev wrote:
| Amazing. You just ruined the internet for everyone,
| making us all wade through heaps of meaningless bullshit,
| only generated to drive the ad revenue!
|
| And do you know what's the best part about that? You even
| made money off of that you can use to purchase the stuff
| you got ads for! Isn't that _exciting_? Thank you for
| your service!
| hu3 wrote:
| Yeah I'm sure my 3 line comment is to blame for whatever
| damage AI does to the internet.
|
| I'll take the compliment anyway :)
| boscillator wrote:
| I find markdown to be a more productive way to write prose
| than HTML. It also shouldn't be too hard to port from one
| generator to another, given that the content is just
| markdown.
| withinboredom wrote:
| it isn't "just" markdown though. "top matter" and custom
| html tags and custom htm in-general kinda breaks the
| appeal.
| akho wrote:
| Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written
| HTML? You need, at the least, single post pages (for
| permalinks), an index page, and an RSS feed -- all slightly
| different views of the same content. It gets messy, and at
| some point you write your own SSG, which somehow becomes
| worse.
|
| This is without going into how you ideally want an image
| pipeline, sitemaps, cards for twitter and stuff, maybe
| category pages, ...
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Have you tried maintaining a blog with plain hand-written
| HTML?
|
| Yes.
|
| It's all a lot simpler than dealing with some abstraction
| framework toolkit, at least for me.
|
| Maybe it's because I learned to write websites in the early
| 2000s where writing your own HTML and CSS was par for the
| course. You'd also write PHP or Ruby or ASP or something if
| you wanted to get fancy.
| akho wrote:
| It's certainly easier until you have to deal with
| different views of the same content. I do not trust
| myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you.
|
| Back in the day I'd have clobbered something together
| with SSIs to have, at least, a single copy of text to
| maintain, but that gets old quickly.
|
| A determined and focused person can probably make do with
| single-post pages and a titles-only styled rss.
|
| Hugo and Zola serve a wider audience.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >It's certainly easier until you have to deal with
| different views of the same content. I do not trust
| myself to keep things consistent, and neither should you.
|
| I would argue that's not a "static" website, but even so
| that's still nothing some smart usage of PHP includes or
| the like can't easily solve.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You are completely right and the people down voting you are
| severely deranged. A HTML site + a wysiwyg solution like
| Surreal CMS is miles better than any site generators, easy to
| use for the client, and dirt cheap.
| lbhdc wrote:
| I think the popularity of Wordpress comes from the access it
| gives to non-technical people (plus ecosystem). I am sure
| someone is smart enough to write a CMS that can effectively do
| that under the hood, but I don't think it matters to the people
| who choose Wordpress.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Also, Wordpress already can generate a static site.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| The principal use of Wordpress IME experience is so people can
| add content without learning markdown and git and so on
| woleium wrote:
| With AI that is now possible without wordpress
| ben_w wrote:
| Kinda yeah, but with a lot of caveats.
|
| AI output is in a frustrating half way place where the
| results are simultaneously better than an amateur and worse
| than someone with a few years of professional experience.
|
| Makes it very tempting to use, but unless you're good at
| attention to detail and reviewing the output, it's also _by
| default_ [0] producing certain tells that make many people
| very weary -- think of the meme "if you didn't bother to
| write it, why should I bother to read it".
|
| [0] you can get past this fairly easily, but IMO learning
| that is a skill that only comes to the kind of technical
| person who would also not have any trouble learning the
| markup/markdown anyway
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| For a subset, sure, the main barrier to entry is people
| believing themselves capable of following instructions and
| caring enough to invest the time. AI enables some people to
| believe in themselves, but most still won't care enough if
| there exists another option where they can just login to a
| web front end and "add post" (granted, GitHub lets you do
| this too, edit a repo from the front end and add a file, I
| suspect a GitHub action can be triggered to rebuild a
| static site from there, then you have free, unhackableish,
| high performance hosting, but theres still a few concepts
| to learn, especially wrt DNS, and you don't get any
| analytics or the e-commerce obviously. Squarespace and
| Shopify will continue being profitable despite certain
| things becoming a little easier.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Ai is less useful for those people because they cant tell
| if its right or wrong output
| internetter wrote:
| There are CMSes that work with static site generators. Static
| site generators do not imply that the input is markdown,
| though this is often the usecase. Any CMS that is decoupled
| from presentation, in fact, could be used for static site
| generation. Just read the structure and generate an
| appropriate HTML tree statically. Here are some CMSes with
| specific thought given to this use:
|
| https://decapcms.org/
|
| https://getkirby.com/
|
| https://tina.io/
|
| https://statamic.com/
|
| ect ect
| ozim wrote:
| You forgot to mention Wordpress as you also can publish
| static websites wit it.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Hadn't looked into that side of things, thanks for the
| links
| claudiulodro wrote:
| Sure, some of the web is read-only, but what about commenting,
| contact forms, forums, eCommerce or anything else that requires
| a proper server? That's a big advantage WP and other full CMS
| have over static site generators.
| xp84 wrote:
| A lot of corpsites are wordpress, and are modified once a
| quarter or so, those should not be running wordpress
| internet-facing due to its terrible performance and constant
| susceptibility to vulnerabilities (or that of its
| themes/plugins landscape due to it being all pure PHP that
| can do anything). Wordpress is a useful tool to generate
| static sites though, I've done that before and it's glorious.
| Use all the friendly authoring tools of WP and then click a
| button to write out an updated blob of HTML files to be
| served by Cloudflare or whatever.
|
| As for forums, those almost don't exist anymore, and contact
| forms and ecommerce are better off being handled by software
| designed to do that rather than some plugin shoehorned into
| an early-2000s PHP blogging platform.
|
| For example, contact forms in Hubspot or Salesforce, and
| ecommerce with Shopify.
|
| Edit to add: If someone's technical enough to be self-hosting
| Wordpress the open-source project, I would trust them to do a
| fine job at selecting a more focused alternative OSS project
| for those "actual server" needs.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Every ecommerce requirement is better served by iframes than
| by WordPress plugins.
| disiplus wrote:
| The benefit of WP is the huge theme and plugin ecosystem. I
| know of people that started a business just on WP + theme +
| plugin without any dev expirience or money for a developer
| xp84 wrote:
| This is basically true, though I'd point out that most of
| those themes and plugins are hot garbage minefields full of
| bugs and security vulns, and due to the fact that it's all
| just wild-west PHP here, a nontechnical WP admin actually
| making use of the whole wide world of plugins and themes out
| there is exactly as safe as downloading absolutely any .exe
| you want while running Windows XP as Administrator without
| any firewall or antivirus software.
|
| Not disputing the usefulness of the platform, just that it's
| a risky thing to expose to the Internet.
| Saris wrote:
| I don't think many will, those are far too difficult to use
| compared to WP which most people use because its so easy.
| jdeibele wrote:
| I set up several websites for non-profits of various types. The
| thing that WordPress.com has going for it is better security
| (updates applied promptly), lower pricing than dedicated WP
| accounts at DreamHost, etc. (typically these kind of providers
| low-ball the first year), usable by non-technical users, etc.
|
| Trying to teach people to use Git to push an update seems
| difficult. And teaching them Markdown. And dealing with images.
|
| someorg.wordpress.com is not as nice as someorg.com but there's
| no domain to be not renewed. There's levels of privileges, etc.
| ezekg wrote:
| I'm still in the camp that Matt is attempting to force a fork
| because he's done with WP. Maybe he believes it can't live
| without his magic touch (lmao). Either that or he's lost his
| mind. :)
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm there with you. He's could be trying to see how far he can
| go to get people to fork, and finding out there's literally
| nothing he can do to make his critics fork on their own dime.
| If it weren't GPL'd, WPE could fork it, close it, and lock it
| down. Instead, the parasite has to volunteer to be the next
| host.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Maybe he believes it can 't live without his magic touch
| (lmao)._
|
| If 2025 Matt tried to fork b2/cafelog back in 2003, I think a
| good number of people in the PHP and blogging communities would
| have told him to, very kindly, fork off.
|
| Or, all that money and power corrupted him over the years.
| noja wrote:
| https://getpublii.com/ Yet, anyone?
| rglover wrote:
| Hadn't heard of this but looks like a pretty nice tool. Thanks
| for sharing :)
| imilk wrote:
| While they have a Github repo, it is incredibly annoying how
| it's almost impossible to find any documentation around
| deployment/hosting. Unless I missing an obvious page
| noja wrote:
| Click the GitHub link. It's a gui. You (or your parents)
| publish the static pages somewhere.
| Spunkie wrote:
| Crazy how hosting wordpress, between 2003-2024, your main concern
| was Chinese/Russian hackers. And in 2025 you main concern should
| be if Mullenweg will hijack your website for his pissing match.
|
| Also he didn't shut down the sustainability team because he
| "didn't know about it". He shut it down because their stated
| goals are a threat to Mullenwegs dictatorship hold over
| wordpress.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| Almost to the letter -- https://www.dalmomendonca.com/rules-
| for-rulers
| bsimpson wrote:
| I wonder if he knows that his personal blog seems to be
| hosted in the template for a yoga studio in South Lake.
| justinator wrote:
| As a content creator, it's mostly dealing with Gutenberg and
| the new theme editor. I couldn't care less what these people
| are up to.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Mullenweg Before:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/live/Qq1SBFzByDw?t=28744s
|
| Mullenweg After:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HblPucwN-m0
| legitster wrote:
| It's crazy how almost overnight Wordpress went from a quiet and
| unassuming piece of the internet infrastructure to crazy
| techbro's personal fiefdom.
|
| Suddenly Wordpress's weird technical quirks and idiosyncrasies
| make sense.
| lenova wrote:
| I've only been passively following the Wordpress drama. Almost a
| year ago, Mullenweg blogged about taking a 3 month sabbatical
| that I found interesting, and I assumed this would have been a
| period of recharging... but things have seemed to gone off the
| rails since. Was there any correlational between the sabbatical
| and current drama, or was that just coincidence?
| mrtksn wrote:
| Did he drink that psychoactive wine?
| ben_w wrote:
| Surely non-psychoactive wine is just grape juice?
| mrtksn wrote:
| right, let's try again: Did he drink THAT psychoactive
| wine?
| throwup238 wrote:
| It's more like a two stage tea made of an MAOI (the first
| type of antidepressant developed) and psychoactive
| tryptamines.
|
| Eight ball yoda says... bad trip sitter he did seek, hmm?
| mrtksn wrote:
| interesting. So what does that tea do to people? I've
| read some things and claims and that it's popular among
| tech C suit.
| throwup238 wrote:
| The best primary source is the Erowid trip reports vault:
| https://www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Ayahuasca.sht
| ml
|
| First it makes people purge (vomit profusely) because the
| MAO enzymes normally break down the psychoactives in the
| stomach, and it reacts violently when the enzymes are
| inhibited with MAOIs. It's likely a reaction to something
| else in the plant because the psychoactives absorb into
| the stomach before they throw up.
|
| The technical name for what happens next is "full
| disassociation" which can best be described as the brain
| disconnecting from the sensor organs and then
| hallucinating whatever it wants in their place. The
| actual experience people have varies all over the place.
| Lots of trip reports of people seeing god, or aliens, or
| seeing their life flash before their eyes.
|
| It's popular among the Silicon Valley crowd in general
| from my experience, but specifically the ritualistic
| experience in the Amazon. Freebasing DMT isn't as
| popular.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| The machine elves need to unionize.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm clearly missing some key context here, judging by the
| other two comments seeming to know what you're talking
| about, but I'm none the wiser about what's the deal with
| him and... Ayahuasca? which I'd never heard of before
| this thread.
| mrtksn wrote:
| There is some chatter about trend among techies drinking
| Ayahuasca and suddenly becoming a different person. I was
| curious if it could be related to the events that
| unfolded unexpectedly.
| ben_w wrote:
| Thanks; none of that came up in a quick web search, so I
| would not have known.
| 65 wrote:
| Perhaps he tried some Ayahuasca and now "doesn't care about
| anything" and it reinforced his narcissism.
|
| Ayahuasca (and DMT for that matter) tend to make people not
| care about anything, so I wonder if he did some and has been
| affected by it. Just a guess, though.
| realce wrote:
| What a wild and disconnected assertion.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Is Ayahuasca passe now?
| doright wrote:
| It makes one speculate how many people out there are just
| one trip away from having their inhibitions semi-
| permanently lowered to where they will no longer let the
| truth go unspoken. If only the neuroplasticity would engage
| and reconnect just enough neural pathways, what things they
| would end up "accomplishing" as a result, that they would
| be too inhibited to see otherwise.
|
| I know a lot of people I would be wary of if they were to
| consume psychedelics, given how they already act towards
| people with restraint.
| miunau wrote:
| I was just saying it's either ayahuasca or a divorce the
| other day. It's major divorced dude energy.
| fancyswimtime wrote:
| DMT makes people not care about anything? seems like a
| blanket statement without any basis
| mikeyouse wrote:
| I don't know about the 'don't care about anything' part -
| but there's some speculation out there about a "one shot
| theory" where some people can't handle the psychological
| impacts of a ayahuasca trip and their brain is scrambled by
| that 'one shot' and they're never the same.. a number of
| relatively normal people who do a retreat don't really come
| back all the way. Combined with the frequency of later
| onset schizophrenia and while life might feel pretty stable
| for a middle-aged person, your mental ability is more
| precarious than most people think.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| It went off the rails _during_ his sabbatical. He was ranting
| about WP "freeloaders" and doxxing random Tumblr users when he
| was supposed to be on vacation.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| I bet Wordpress will be fine. Too bad Automattic isn't a public
| company, bet it would be volatile right now.
| causality0 wrote:
| Anybody know if Mullenweg has recently purchased property in
| Belize? I'm curious how far along the McAfee curve he's gotten.
| electriclove wrote:
| From his perspective, after everything he has done, others are
| getting the financial gains and many in the community turned on
| him and his company. It must be a horrible feeling.
| frereubu wrote:
| I sort of get what you're trying to do here - an exercise in
| empathy - but the flip side of this is that he has been made
| _enormously_ wealthy off the back of thousands and thousands of
| unpaid volunteer hours on an open source project. It 's not
| only "others" who are getting the financial gains.
| electriclove wrote:
| Good point and agreed. Do you think for him it is more an
| issue about how much money WP Engine is making compared to
| him or the relative influence they have?
| frereubu wrote:
| I'm not really sure to be honest! He could well be thinking
| exactly what you said, I was just pointing out the flip
| side of that argument if that is what he believes, because
| it would be doing a real disservice to the open source
| community around WordPress without which he would be
| nothing.
| addisonj wrote:
| But... isn't that a core ethos of open-source? That you won't
| _ever_ come even close to capturing the full value provided by
| a piece of software... but the nature of the problem is such
| that the value could never be created unless it was open.
|
| I like to think of this as a "reverse" faustian bargain. By
| sticking to some agreed upon "moral" agreement of this open
| contribution and communal governance, you create a huge market
| that you get to try and least capture a piece of. If you break
| that bargin, you risk the project. And it isn't like this is
| some theoretical bit... it has been shown again and again in
| different communities.
|
| I fundamentally don't understand how you can spend so long in
| open-source and think that this agreement doesn't apply to you.
| That may seem "cruel" in that someone else can profit from
| you... but that was always part of the bargain that made your
| business exist in the first place.
| hooverd wrote:
| Or, he's loose off the vine juice.
| treyd wrote:
| WordPress is a very mature project with a long legacy but I'm
| surprised that there hasn't been a larger profile attempt to make
| a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage of being
| PHP and the long history of vulns that have come along with it.
|
| I'm imagining some very pluggable and template driven runtime
| that you can ship very declarative packages for. The spicy take
| would be to use a Scheme for the templating around some robust
| Rust core, but that's probably not the widest appeal. Maybe there
| would be some clever way to bootstrap it out of PHP so that you
| can keep using shared PHP hosts and they wouldn't have to bring
| along a new software distribution.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| It's just a reminder how much "right place at the right time"
| plays into the phenomenon of ubiquity, from Wordpress to Harry
| Potter to Zoom to Javascript.
|
| There are countless efforts to make the next Wordpress out
| there, yet no combination of Scheme and Rust is going to make
| up for the critical missing ingredient of "right place at the
| right time".
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| This is the right time. Strike while the iron is hot. People
| are angry and concerned. Someone just needs to come forward
| with an attractive way to capitalize on the situation.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| But the problem is that if Wordpress disappears overnight,
| you're left with a sea of alternatives that's 100x larger
| than when Wordpress rose to popularity.
|
| Ex-Wordpress users are just going to diffuse into all the
| other decent options that already exist. Or stick with a
| Wordpress fork that caters to them. Though note that
| Wordpress isn't going away. How many Wordpress users even
| know who Mullenweg is?
|
| The idea of cobbling together yet another blog platform
| that will somehow capture these users better than Wordpress
| plus all the decent incumbents is some good ol fashioned
| developer hubris. :P
| munchler wrote:
| There are many examples of an entrenched incumbent being
| displaced by a new killer app. All it takes is the right
| new features and perhaps a path from the old to the new.
| nottorp wrote:
| You mean there aren't already 20 unfinished projects
| reimplementing Wordpress in Rust?
| treyd wrote:
| Not yet there aren't. Perhaps we should form a committee to
| start a few and ensure that none of them actually have thr
| critical mass go succeed!
| raverbashing wrote:
| And honestly WP is a great product. No other CMS managed to
| get so much community around, so many plugins etc
|
| Right timing absolutely, but there was also great product
| sense there
|
| Drupal feels like it's a bureaucrats paradise. Other CMSs
| never got there neither
| greggman7 wrote:
| What would replace it?
|
| PHP is unique in that it makes sharing a server trivial and
| low-resource compared to almost every other solution.
|
| A simple example might be that you can run 100s of PHP forums
| on a single machine low memory machine but if you want to use
| discourse (not written in PHP), it requires 10x 20x the
| resources for a single forum.
|
| This is true about almost every other solution AFAICT.
| andix wrote:
| That's probably the best explanation. There is no real
| alternative to PHP if you want to host cheap and simple. It's
| also really easy to deploy WordPress to a shared hoster, just
| by uploading a few files via FTP/etc and setting up a MySQL
| connection.
|
| Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared
| webspaces?
| bsimpson wrote:
| When Wordpress first came up, PHP was something anyone with
| $5 could administer, and Python/Ruby required a lot more
| money and expertise that put them outside the reach of
| junior hobbyists.
|
| This was before the days of PaaS solutions like AppEngine.
| andix wrote:
| I don't know any PaaS solution that is not at least a
| magnitude more complex than a simple PHP shared hoster.
|
| As much as I hate PHP, the typical LAMP shared hosting is
| by far the most simple kind of PaaS.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for
| shared webspaces?_
|
| I think I just threw up a little, in my mouth...
|
| I don't think there's a viable alternative to PHP. The
| nerds here, hate it (and they aren't really wrong). I hate
| it, but it is undisputed God Emperor of Cheap Hosting.
| There's nothing that even comes close, for simplicity,
| speed, robustness, cost, and ubiquity. There are _millions_
| of pages of support, years of support forums, and hundreds
| of thousands of people that can work with PHP at an expert
| level. Despite the hate, PHP is a mature, modern language,
| still very much under development, and supported by many
| corporations. Much of the primitive stuff it started with,
| has been replaced (I think, rather clumsily, but it works).
|
| The simplest hosting solutions have LAMP ("P" being "PHP"),
| and there are _millions_ of LAMP servers out there. Every
| single one can run WP, simply by uploading a few files,
| creating a MySQL DB /User, tweaking a config, and Bjorn
| Stronginthearm's your uncle. Or, with things like WPE, you
| can click on a button in your control panel dashboard.
|
| Also, non-HN-readers can manage just about every aspect of
| a WP server, once it's set up. People have made careers
| from that.
|
| This sucks.
|
| I run a couple of sites. I use WP, because it means that I
| don't have to waste much time, managing them. I could
| definitely switch over to a static generator (what I would
| use, if I didn't do WP), or even write my own sites, using
| handcoded HTML (I have done that, and have even written my
| own CMSes, in The Dark Ages). I just don't want to have to
| do that. The moment I walk away from WP, I am sealing my
| own fate. It will make it ten times as hard to push the
| sites over to someone else to manage.
|
| I am an indifferent (at best) Web designer. Almost every
| person here, could probably code circles around me. That
| means that working on Web sites is painful and slow,
| detracting from what I'm actually good at.
|
| This sucks.
| andix wrote:
| >> Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for
| shared webspaces?
|
| >I think I just threw up a little, in my mouth...
|
| Sorry ;)
| munchler wrote:
| What is it about PHP that makes this low-resource scenario
| possible?
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| I would say the biggest reason might be that PHP doesn't
| have to worry about the web server aspect. Apache (or
| another webserver) serves the requests, PHP just returns
| the page to Apache. This is one of the ways that Apache can
| serve hundreds of PHP based sites, cause there's no need to
| spin up another web server and Apache is pretty fast at
| what it does.
| jjk7 wrote:
| That's just CGI. You could theoretically do the same with any
| other language, but PHP is just the most popular.
| greggman7 wrote:
| PHP integrates with the server. It does not have the spawn
| a new process per request like CGI
| Suppafly wrote:
| I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make.
| smarx007 wrote:
| https://wagtail.org/who-uses-wagtail/ lists a few companies
| who would care about low resource use due to the sheer amount
| of traffic they see.
| adolph wrote:
| > [PHP] makes sharing a server trivial
|
| Is that still a thing? Why would an application on a server
| share anything other than the kernel?
| samuell wrote:
| As I understand, the vulns come because of a big messy codebase
| and the idea to solve everything with another 3rd party plugin.
|
| Processwire OTOH is fantastic in this regard. Super small and
| generic core with minimal, close to non-existent attack
| surface, and a programmatic API that lets you solve custom
| functionality with a few calls to the content API instead of
| another plugin.
|
| Leads to practically maintenance free sites.
|
| Almost the security of a static site, with the flexibility and
| dynamic features of a proper cms.
|
| After having the nightmare of maintaining a dozen WP and Drupal
| sites in the past, I can now just let the sites chug along for
| years without intervention.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > a spiritual successor to it that can shake the baggage
|
| Plenty of people have made better CMSes, Wordpress is big
| because it got big, and a lot of people depend on it. And since
| an enormous number of people are involved with it, your upstart
| system will never have the capability of Wordpress. Whatever
| capability you come up with, somebody will have already made a
| horrible module to install on Wordpress to do it that after 10
| years has become almost alright, or at least all of the flaws
| have been posted on messageboards and everybody knows how to
| work around them.
|
| Wordpress isn't wordpress because it's good, it's wordpress
| because it was good enough at the time, and its competition was
| Drupal and Joomla (or something not PHP.) PHP baggage? PHP
| isn't PHP because it's good, it's PHP because of mod_php, and
| cheap hosts. To repeat, your choices: Wordpress, Joomla,
| Drupal, or figuring out how to run another language on your
| cheap host, or having to pay to upgrade your hosting account.
| By far the best option for most people was Wordpress.
|
| If you want to compete with Wordpress, first get a time
| machine, then go back to that time and write something better
| _in PHP._
| dylan604 wrote:
| meh, if you're gonna cheat with a time machine, then just
| bring a floppy disc with the various versions of wordpress.
| as PHP gets update, just release the newer version of
| wordpress. it's open source, right?
| dageshi wrote:
| Every time I read a comment like this about replacing WP and
| PHP with a successor it just sounds so incredibly out of touch.
|
| I mean no offense OP but it's obvious you have no clue at all
| about who actually uses WP and why they do it.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _I 'm surprised that there hasn't been a larger profile
| attempt to make a spiritual successor to it that can shake the
| baggage of being PHP and the long history of vulns that have
| come along with it._
|
| I imagine that a spiritual successor would have a one-click
| install in many web hosts, which is all but impossible if not
| still written in PHP, and then installable through the various
| turnkey web hosting reseller stacks (e.g. Softaculous).
|
| Then, replicating many of the popular plugins, and getting a
| whole community of contributors onboard who already make their
| living off WordPress and have little incentive to adopt
| something with little traction.
|
| WordPress isn't a code framework; it's a very complete
| application with a massive ecosystem of plugins that serves as
| its moat.
| kemayo wrote:
| > shake the baggage of being PHP
|
| PHP is _why_ WordPress was a success. PHP is available
| basically everywhere, for cheap. You can get a $5 /month
| hosting plan that'll give you a VPS with mod_php and mysql and
| you'll be able to install WordPress. (Also, WordPress put some
| actual effort into having a quick-and-simple setup process. If
| you can upload some files onto a server, it can take it from
| there.) Thus _anyone_ can trivially install WordPress.
|
| There's "better" languages, but even today they tend to require
| more of you to get a working site deployed.
| blueaquilae wrote:
| Is this just an add for another paid CMS?
| frereubu wrote:
| Might be an ad - I'm not aware of the author's associations -
| but Craft CMS, which is linked to, has a free version like
| wordpress.org
| GavinAnderegg wrote:
| Nope. I just prefer Craft, and I think it's a much more stable
| platform in terms of leadership these days. I also think it
| provides for a much better developer experience. Just opinions,
| though. I currently don't monetize my blog in any way -- though
| I should probably change that at some point :)
| voytec wrote:
| Narcissistic personality disorder[0] is unnoticeable for a person
| having it, but makes lives of all around them a living hell. Such
| person is always right, and the 99.99% people around with an
| opposite opinion/viewpoint are idiots. If some "idiot" is
| standing up, there comes the retaliation part.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disor...
| renewiltord wrote:
| Hard to care about this drama until it starts to affect
| functionality. Terraform is still around. Elastic is still
| around. Reddit and Twitter have no third party apps. I used to
| have a WordPress blog which I stopped updating for reasons of
| laziness. I will try to restore the backup and see what happens.
| mfashby wrote:
| You can actually still use infinity for Reddit it's just a pain
| to get it.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Earlier discussion:
|
| _Aligning Automattic 's Sponsored Contributions to WordPress_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42650138
|
| _WordPress: Joost /Karim Fork_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42662801
|
| _Matt Mullenweg deactivates WordPress accounts of contributors
| planning a fork_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42667766
| beshrkayali wrote:
| I really think Matt is suffering from some sort of a mental
| breakdown. It's a sad situation and there's a lot to learn about
| open source projects with a huge user base and where the bottle
| necks exist. But I think people who know or are close to him
| should seriously consider an intervention. I can't believe after
| two decades he'd just decide to throw it all out in a blazing
| fire and tarnish his reputation (and Wordpress) because of some
| valuation drop or being short on money. I think the dude needs
| help, and people close to him should try and talk sense into him.
| dangrossman wrote:
| I don't think it's a mental breakdown, I think this is a
| (poorly executed) long pivot into Matt's companies having
| tighter control over the ecosystem and keeping more of the
| profits from hosting, plugin and theme sales. He's burning down
| "the community" on purpose. In a couple years, it'll be run
| more like Shopify, where the theme store and app store only
| list products that run their billing through Shopify and give
| Shopify a 15%+ share of all associated revenue.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| One reason that Reddit's API changes killing the best clients
| was so poisonous is that the resulting non-exodus showed
| other companies that they can take user-hostile actions with
| impunity. A big enough mass of passive and undiscerning users
| will stay no matter what. Hence there being more freedom to
| take a strategy like this.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Reddit has been user hostile since 2014. It's just that as
| long as you hurt one part of the community the other parts
| hate you're fine.
|
| The mods are universally hated on reddit and they were the
| ones most impacted by the changes. The average user either
| didn't notice or stopped getting automatically banned for
| joining the wrong subreddits.
| jjmarr wrote:
| > The average user... stopped getting automatically
| banned for joining the wrong subreddits.
|
| Still happens, you're just not allowed to talk about it.
| /r/bannedforbeingjewish (which collated this) is
| banned,[1] but to give an example, /r/interestingasfuck
| (13 million subscribers) bans users that are members of
| /r/Israel.[2]
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/bannedforbeingjewish/
|
| [2] https://archive.is/OkfOY
| Suppafly wrote:
| What's weird is the subs that will ban you for simply
| commenting in another sub, especially for just one
| comment, even if your comments are contrary to the theme
| of the sub.
| encom wrote:
| When r/thedonald was around, I would debate
| misconceptions americans had about politics in Denmark
| from time to time (no we're not socialist). And of course
| I would get banned left and right (but mostly left), and
| would get the "you post in thedonald, ergo I win"-line
| regularly.
|
| Reddit was a trash heap then, and it's gotten
| exponentially worse since. Why anyone go there
| voluntarily is beyond me. It contains nothing of value.
| zdragnar wrote:
| If you like British panel shows (or any version of
| taskmaster) then /r/panelshow is pretty great. Not much
| chatter, but then again, maybe that's part of the appeal
| lol.
| ismail wrote:
| Let's be super clear, [2] does not ban the user for being
| Jewish as per [1] claims.
|
| There is no way for the mod/bot to know this rather. It
| is clearly spelt out in the terms.
|
| "You have been banned for participating in a bad-faith
| subreddit (specifically Israel) which brigades other
| subreddits and spreads
| propaganda/disinformation/racism/sexism."
|
| Personally I don't use Reddit that much, so I can speak
| to if this statement is true or not, the mods however do
| think it is.
| ismail wrote:
| Further if anyone has ever had a conversation with a
| Zionist or Israeli , it's like they are living in their
| own bubble with alternate facts that most everyone knows
| is false.
|
| It's like they are not dedicated to a commitment to the
| realisation of truth, nor are they able to effectively
| make sense of reality.
|
| They just repeat hasbara talking points , which are
| straight out of handbooks / training manuals. They
| completely ignore disconfirming evidence, and seem to
| deal with a ton of cognitive dissonance without realising
| it.
|
| The level of self-deception is really something to
| behold.
|
| If /r/israel has people like that posting, I am not
| surprised that other subreddits consider it a source of
| misinformation.
|
| The entire country produces misinformation at an
| industrial scale, and parrots misinformation at the
| highest level.
|
| Numerous fact checking sites/investigations have revealed
| the lies.
|
| For example
|
| "Fact check: Netanyahu falsely claims there have been
| 'practically' no civilian fatalities in Rafah, besides
| one incident" https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/fact-
| check-netanyahu-fa...
|
| So while I can't speak to the truth of the claim that the
| subreddit spreads misinformation, you can test this by
| trying to have a rational conversation with a Zionist.
| hluska wrote:
| This is extremely racist. You should be ashamed - you're
| getting really close to quoting Hitler and that's a
| disgrace.
| pants2 wrote:
| I think Reddit's API changes and more did lead to an Exodus
| of a good chunk of power users that gave the site more of
| an identity. But what's worse is the official Reddit
| clients gamify using Reddit so much that, on the whole,
| content quality is down significantly, even in the smaller
| niche subreddits that usually had great stuff. The problem
| is high quality content isn't profitable, endless scrolling
| is.
| gunsle wrote:
| Very insightful, didn't think about Reddit's incentive to
| promote low effort garbage over quality content
| lupire wrote:
| The problem is there communities are hard to build and
| easy to destroy.
|
| Reddit destroying its user communities causes real
| damage. Those users don't magically congregate somewhere
| else.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| People keep saying this but I haven't noticed any drops
| in quality. The default subs have always been bad, and
| the niche subs continue to be good, in my experience. Do
| you have any specific examples?
| llm_trw wrote:
| This is making the big assumption that power users add to
| the quality of the site instead of the quantity.
| duxup wrote:
| People care about content, apis less so, unfortunately.
| brookst wrote:
| > undiscerning users will stay no matter what
|
| That's one take.
|
| Another is: ecosystem partners are often surprised what
| users actually value. We all like to think that our
| contributions are critical, but the Reddit example shows a
| huge disconnect between the value 3P partners thought they
| were delivering and what users actually valued.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Eh. Aquia tried a similar stunt with Drupal (centralize all
| the tings at the community's expense) and that hasn't exactly
| been a rousing success. I don't have a great feel for how
| dependent upon the larger dev community the WordPress
| ecosystem is so maybe it'll work for them?
| daitangio wrote:
| I fear you are right. Remember they ask $25/monthly for 1
| website on pressable, I can run Wordpress open source for 5x
| month on Linode, and there are ready made installation on
| docker, digital ocean and so on...
| hobs wrote:
| That implies you need to dedicate the 5 bucks a month per
| instance, when you look at how much things are write once
| and cacheable as heck, you could easily get customers down
| to pennies per instance per month.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Pressable includes support, global caching, and a bunch of
| other things you won't get on a $5/month VPS. Also not
| everyone wants to play system administrator 7 days a week
| to keep their server from getting hijacked or nuked.
| debesyla wrote:
| True, but shared hosting providers (like hostinger)
| offers basically the same, but for cheaper and no pricing
| per website, even on cheaper plans you can fit five or
| more sites in.
|
| Of course, it doesn't matter in the end - as long as
| users have ability to choose a hosting there will be
| cheaper and "better" options. Shopyfing wordpress would
| be worse...
| chrismsimpson wrote:
| Perhaps more indicative of late stage capitalism where rent
| seekers try to extract more and more value and consolidate
| more and more power.
| labster wrote:
| Late stage capitalism is almost indistinguishable from a
| mental disorder, though.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| How is this unique to "late stage capitalism"? That same
| sentence can be used mad lib style for any human endevor.
|
| >Perhaps more indicative of ________ where rent seekers try
| to extract more and more value and consolidate more and
| more power
|
| Feudal Europe Roman patrician class British Raj Ming
| dynasty bureaucrats Latin American drug cartels etc
|
| Point being that the "late stage capitalism" people lack
| rigor and don't add to the conversation
| JBiserkov wrote:
| Don't argue with me about definitions, I'm trying to
| explain what I think the GP meant and why `the "late
| stage capitalism" people lack rigor and don't add to the
| conversation` is incorrect.
|
| Capitalism-imperialism: a system based on endless growth
| and expansionism, where the proletariat in the imperial
| core is pacified by the crumbs the capitalist give it
| from the plunder of the colonies; the crumbs also allow
| the proletariat to buy the goods and services, thus
| maintaining demand, sort of.
|
| Late stage capitalism-imperialism: the entire planet in
| conquered, the "low-hanging" resources have been
| consumed, there is nowhere left to expand, except inward,
| so the capitalists start cannibalizing the proletariat in
| the imperial core by giving it less and less crumbs, in
| order to achieve even higher rates of profit; to remain
| in power, while the masses see their quality of life
| decline / starve, they need to consolidate more and more
| power. More than the absolute monarchs ever had.
|
| > the entire planet in conquered, the "low-hanging"
| resources have been consumed
|
| that same sentence canNOT be used to describe any human
| endeavor in any other epoch. We are in the anthropocene
| now.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| okay sure, going back and forth on definitions is boring.
|
| I just disagree that late stage capitalism imperialism is
| where we're at. It's not true for the US, or the west or
| the globe.
|
| Yes we're in the anthropocene, and while that phrase has
| a negative implication nowadays, it is not true that
| anthropocene means "low hanging resources" have been
| consumed leading to uncontrolled rent seeking. It is no
| more true than a barracuda lurking in a coral is an out
| of control rent seeker. That's just the nature of
| barracudas.
| legitster wrote:
| > "late stage capitalism"
|
| The term is 100 years old and was created to refer to
| everything after WWI. I don't think people using the term
| would actually subscribe to the idea that human
| development under capitalism peaked in the 1910s.
|
| Furthermore, the entire concept was developed as a
| justification for the Nazi party and their economic
| ideas. Which I think is justification enough that people
| should stay away from lazy, doomy political tropes.
| goatlover wrote:
| Do you know an economic system in the real world that
| doesn't have this problem?
| nativeit wrote:
| We spent most of the last 70-years doing a pretty good
| job of aggressively sabotaging and suppressing any
| efforts to develop alternative economic systems. Even the
| few successes one might claim for communism are largely
| dependent on some kind of concession to allow for
| capitalism in limited areas. This doesn't necessarily
| mean that capitalism is inherently superior, it's just
| dominant.
|
| The problem as I see it isn't simply capitalism=bad, it
| has produced the greatest expansion of wealth in history
| after all, but rather it's just not equipped to be the
| answer for everything. There are problems and
| opportunities that exist where capitalism does not have a
| solution for. Things like healthcare, equitable wealth
| distribution, and environmental sustainability are the
| obvious examples that come to mind.
|
| These false dichotomies and unnecessarily tribalistic
| positions where pure devotion to free market capitalism
| is demanded are hobbling American society and its ability
| to maintain stability and take care of its citizens,
| since every attempt to suggest that some industries
| should be at least partially socialized, or even mildly
| regulated, are met with demagoguery and fear mongering.
| Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that's what's
| happening here, I am speaking in broad terms.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| WP engine is pretty obviously the "rent seekers" in this
| situation. hard to be a rent seeker if you actually built
| the software
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You may be right. Come to think of it, until this drama, the
| only "community" I believed exists around Wordpress is the
| network of small businesses specialized in Wordpress hosting,
| maintenance and consulting for other small businesses. I
| personally know someone running a sole proprietorship, whose
| entire income over past ~decade came from such Wordpress
| jobs.
|
| It might be that this will be the only "community" that
| remains going forward.
| kedean wrote:
| He's doing it in a way that feels suspiciously like a
| breakdown to me. The latest "we're restricting our
| contributions to 45 hours a week to match WPEngine" is the
| the reaction of a college student who is mad at their lab
| partner, not of an establish business that helped build the
| internet as we know it.
| threeseed wrote:
| But there is every possibility that they were always going
| to do this.
|
| Wouldn't be the first time a commercial/open source company
| dedicated the majority of their resources to the commercial
| side.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Lots of executives at big companies can be petty though,
| it's nothing new when one is in power and surrounds
| themselves with yes men. It doesn't mean they're
| necessarily having a breakdown at all.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| sure it's petty but i still feel that wp engine kinda sucks
| here
| legitster wrote:
| One thing to keep in mind, WordPress being open source was an
| afterthought. It inherited a GPL from b2/cafelog.
|
| If Matt woke up one morning and decided he wanted to make
| WordPress closed source, he couldn't. But what he _could_ do
| is force everyone to pay a license fee for the name, and
| anyone who did not pay he publicly makes hell for them. You
| could also pretend to encourage them to fork, knowing full
| well they would be bound by a GPL just like him.
|
| This is actually a very successful business strategy and even
| has a name: racketeering.
| lupire wrote:
| Using the GPL is not racketeering. Why would any user
| expect _more_ rights than a contributor?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I don't understand your point about forking, yes they'd
| have the GPL but so what? They can control their fork from
| then on, it doesn't matter if they have to continue open
| sourcing contributions, in fact it'd be preferable to
| whatever Matt is doing.
| vasco wrote:
| I think you may have a point about what will happen, but that
| can happen at the same time as a mental breakdown. How do you
| justify something like this
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/pineapple-on-pizza-is-
| deli... if you only believe in the power play? How does this
| fit in?
| harikb wrote:
| Here is an alternate possibility
|
| 1. They introduced a checkbox for "users to confirm that
| they are not affiliated with WP Engine"
|
| 2. A court ordered Automattic to reverse course
|
| 3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change the
| text rather than make code changes.
|
| Let us not say people are crazy when there are alternate
| narratives
| lupire wrote:
| That's likely to corrupt the database backend, which now
| appears to store old "non WP Engine" affirmations in the
| same location as new "pineapple pizza" affirmations. How
| will they be able to distinguish?
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| You're assuming they actually care to distinguish. But
| real answer, barring a brief period where some users may
| get a cached version, they can likely just use the date
| of change to determine before and after if necessary.
| nathansherburn wrote:
| I don't think the purpose of the checkbox was to collect
| useful data but an any case storing it as a date would
| probably solve the issue.
| vasco wrote:
| One would argue it's as easy to hide it in CSS and auto-
| check it. The first version of the checkbox was
| unprofessional and the second one even more since it was
| also a court order, and instead of just a deep breath and
| hiding / removing it, they doubled down in a passive
| aggressive, fake jokey way.
|
| Also I said it's possible it's due to a mental breakdown,
| which is very different from affirming someone has a
| mental breakdown and was a follow-up to a previous
| comment. I'm pointing out both are possible together, not
| diagnosing.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| not only would i say this is a possible explanation, i
| would say it is the _obvious_ explanation - and pretty
| ridiculous to accuse someone of having a mental breakdown
| based on this
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Lol, this is like every bad stereotype about the general
| quality of WordPress websites: "Getting rid of a checkbox
| is too technically complicated, so let's just change the
| text instead to something completely nonsensical."
|
| I actually find your explanation even less believable
| than this being a symptom of a crazy person (which I
| don't necessarily believe it is either).
| hluska wrote:
| 3. Developer thought it was easy to quickly just change
| the text rather than make code changes.
|
| To some nonsense about pineapple on pizza? Are there any
| adults left?
| MarkSweep wrote:
| No reasonable developer, given the requirement "remove
| this checkbox as required by a court order", would
| respond by changing it to "I love pineapple on pizza".
| There are so many other things that could be possibly
| done instead: just remove it, hide it with CSS, change it
| to a "<input type=hidden />", or change the text to
| "please check the box" if it was really so hard to
| remove. I can't imagine any lone developer or product
| manager being so petty that they would risk their job to
| spite a court order. The checkbox is only there because
| someone higher up wants it to be there.
| nightpool wrote:
| I'll be honest: I think it's pretty funny, and I think matt
| probably agrees. Also, as others mention, it's much
| easier/faster then removing the field and column and
| validation, yes.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > because of some valuation drop or being short on money.
|
| Why is that hard to believe? People have done much worse for
| much less money.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| People would rather believe their leaders broke their brain
| than to accept that their power is wielded over us for
| selfish personal gain
| simple10 wrote:
| I feel for him and the people in his wake. Benevolent dictators
| of open source are great for productivity until benevolence
| gives way to malevolence.
|
| At this point, if he stepped down it would be seen as giving
| in. So highly unlikely until the legal dust settles a bit.
|
| I also agree with other commenters that it's not a mental
| breakdown but more of a poorly executed strategy that's been in
| the works for awhile. To take Wordpress more into a closed
| source hybrid ecosystem.
|
| And at this point, anything Matt does in favor of Automattic's
| business plan will blow up on social. My bet is this will
| continue for another 6 months at least until Automattic's
| revenue increases or flatlines.
|
| But yeah, I'm curious about the mental toll when founders go
| through these types of hyper public events. The startup world
| needs a lot more discussion and guidance for mental health.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Benevolent dictators of open source are great for
| productivity until benevolence gives way to malevolence._
|
| Autocracy is more efficient, with the best leaders.
|
| Democracy is more stable, with the worst leaders.
|
| The suboptimal cases are autocracy with bad leaders or
| democracy with good leaders.
|
| I think it's also pretty common that autocratic leaders go
| badly quickly. The same focus and dedication that drove them
| also makes it unlikely they'll suddenly decide to step away
| cleanly. Instead, they'll decide that everyone else is wrong,
| they're the ones that really put in all the work, {insert
| rationalization here}, and fight change.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _The suboptimal cases are autocracy with bad leaders or
| democracy with good leaders_
|
| If we're talking real-life dictatorships and republics, the
| latter make _much_ better use of brilliant leaders '
| talents. In part by not having a power struggle at the end
| that, on a coin flip, decides if the work survives.
| emaro wrote:
| Agreed. I also think that _being_ an autocratic leader
| makes it worse, because you get used to yes-sayers around
| you and the power in general.
| pluc wrote:
| There is nobody left to disagree with him, he made sure of
| that. Disagreeing with him at this point means he's gonna come
| after you [1], your job [2] or your reputation [3].
|
| 1. https://ma.tt/2024/10/on-dhh/
|
| 2. https://kindness.is/examples/2010/mullenweg-the-coward/
|
| 3. https://ma.tt/2024/12/inc-hit-piece/
| MattDaEskimo wrote:
| Parasocial sympathetic deflection at its finest.
|
| This is a childish emperor tantrum, stressing everybody beneath
| him for petty cause.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Respectfully, confidently asserting someone else's mental
| state or their motives is a mistake. Because there's no way
| for you to know, it backs you and others into an intellectual
| corner that is entirely unnecessary and lowers the level of
| discourse, in addition to being unhelpful when people are
| experiencing actual psychiatric crises.
| gspencley wrote:
| My personal take on this has to do entirely with how the
| decision to block WP Engine access to WordPress.org, unless
| they were willing to pay for it, was arrived at. And this is a
| critical detail that I'm fuzzy on. If anyone has context (even
| links with further info) I'd be very much appreciative.
|
| I have since read the WP Engine complaint. I understand what
| they are alleging. I'm just not 100% clear on the nitty and
| gritty details that led there. All I know are the high level
| about WP Foundation demanding payment from WP Engine.
|
| As a matter of principle, I believe very strongly that a
| creator has the right to set the conditions upon which their
| creations are disposed of, and that no one is entitled to
| services provided by others free of charge in perpetuity. If it
| is the case that WP Engine was costing WordPress.org a lot of
| money and that they were the single largest consumer of
| WordPress.org's web services, then I don't think it is
| unreasonable for WordPress.org to say "Hey, this is not
| financially viable for us, we think we're going to need either
| ask that you setup local mirrors, or we can maybe arrange a pay
| as you go deal."
|
| I hear a lot of people express the opinion that Matt seems
| unhinged and is trying to "extort" money from WP Engine. But
| without knowing more that seems, to me, like looters and
| moochers demanding that other people pay out of pocket for
| things they want or need. I want there to be more to the story
| than that.
|
| And for what it's worth I have little difficulty believing that
| Matt just went about things in all the wrong ways and could
| have worked things out without resorts to litigation if he
| wasn't such a jerk about it.
|
| But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your rights.
| WordPress.org has to pay for their servers and WP Engine is a
| for-profit company that is using WordPress.org's services, free
| of charge, for their own gain. Mutual consideration here seems
| warranted.
|
| So what, specifically, led to WP Foundation choosing to ask WP
| Engine to pay for the services they are using? I've heard
| accusations that there has been a feud between the two going
| back years but if those finer details are buried in that story,
| then why is Matt / WP Foundation acting unfairly by asking for
| payment?
|
| (Before anyone responds, I understand the Promissory Estoppel
| theory that forms the legal complaint, I'm asking specifically
| about peoples' understanding, even if speculative, regarding
| Matt's motivations).
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Differentiating IP/copyright/code rights and infrastructure
| hosting is definitely an important aspect of the feud.
|
| In a perfect world, open source projects would never use
| private infrastructure (and would certainly not privilege any
| particular private infrastructure!).
|
| That said, the ability to 'open source' infrastructure (read:
| have hosting provided by a non-profit or similar attached to
| the open source project) has always been more difficult
| (financially, legally, and practically) than simply commiting
| a license file.
| moshegramovsky wrote:
| Well said.
|
| I think Matt Mullenweg has every right to take the action
| he's taking. It really seems like many companies are
| perfectly happy to exploit open source products.
|
| In this case, it seems like one company makes a lot of money
| using the Wordpress codebase and doesn't want to make equal
| contributions. Then they use the money they're making to turn
| around and sue Wordpress for standing up for themselves.
|
| If I were Matt Mullenweg, you can bet I would be incensed!
| I'm honestly very surprised that Matt Mullenweg is facing
| such criticism when he's simply trying to protect IP that he
| and the community have spent a lot of time and money building
| together. It's only natural to want to ban the freeloaders,
| and in any case, it's a little outrageous to think anyone is
| entitled to access to the resources and creations of others
| with or without compensation.
| seriocomic wrote:
| I don't think there's any disagreement about that
| particular aspect of what kicked this all off (in terms of
| being incensed about an imbalance of contributions to money
| being made) - it's the _way_ he went about that, _then_ all
| the subsequent WPDrama that unfolded (personal attacks,
| unilateral cancellations, removals, blockages, deletions
| etc) that has most people concerned.
|
| I've been around WordPress since 2003 (since the fork from
| B2/Cafelog) and have watched Matt evolve over that time,
| make a few missteps, act/react with humility, speak
| conscientiously on a wide range of matters and issues. The
| actions of the past 12 months seem quite contrary to that
| established behaviour (speaking from a far perspective &
| never had met the man in person).
|
| I feel sad whether this is a deliberate or unintentional
| (mental) path, but am confident that like the drama that
| created WP's popularity orignally (MoveableType), there
| will be a path forward for the community - it's the damage
| that will be done in getting there that's upsetting...
| jcranmer wrote:
| WordPress is an open source project, and part of being an
| open source project is you don't really have a right to
| demand that people not mooch off of your work, at least as
| far as most open source licenses are concerned [1]. If you
| don't like that, well, then open source isn't for you.
|
| The other major complication here is that Matt has
| _thoroughly_ mixed his several roles together, so you have to
| spend time untangling what is Matt-personally, what is Matt-
| as-his-company, and what is WordPress-via-Matt. When you
| untangle that, the core demand appears to be that Matt (in
| who knows what role) demanded that WP Engine compensate Matt-
| the-company for its use of WordPress-via-Matt resources being
| provided by Matt-personally (that no one knew was being
| provided by Matt-personally as opposed to WordPress-via-
| Matt). Given the thoroughly tangled mess of that stuff, and
| the fact that--in the past--Matt made several steps to
| _untangle_ the ownership of everything, I am not particularly
| persuaded by the logic of "I'm just trying to get them to
| pay their fair share," as they're not being asked to pay the
| people they should be paying.
|
| > why is Matt / WP Foundation acting unfairly by asking for
| payment?
|
| Because they're asking someone to pay, not the foundation
| whose resources they are allegedly using, but their largest
| competitor (a _very_ distinct legal entity).
|
| [1] There are licenses that do have clauses that let you take
| action, but generally having such a clause makes it not Open
| Source-compliant, and frequently the relicensing needed to
| bring the current licenses to that state involves a lot of
| drama.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| WordPress' GPL license guarantees you access to the code
| and specific rights. It doesn't guarantee you access to the
| the WordPress database repository of plugins and themes.
|
| WordPress could, in theory, make the repository free for
| access to all except larger hosting entities that put more
| of a strain on things, for which there is a fee or
| throttling. Possibly even indicating this within the
| WordPress admin UI which flavor of access the user is
| getting. "Pro" vs "Free" for example.
|
| Note that I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and
| this is based on my understanding of open source licenses
| like the GPL over my 20 years working on PortableApps.com.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| > But being a jerk isn't a crime and doesn't forfeit your
| rights.
|
| The court case isn't about Matt being a jerk, it's about
| crime.
|
| > WordPress.org has to pay for their servers
|
| Wordpress.org was sold to volunteers as a community asset
| owned by the foundation not Matt and even Matt's lawyer made
| public statements to that effect.
|
| Volunteers spent their time building it up, developing in to
| WordPress core reliance on w.org infra, etc..
|
| Matt has a long history of un-ethical behaviour, and the
| current WPDrama is extensive. For me alone, the one
| screenshot of his threats to go to the press with
| confidential information about someone unless they did what
| he wants was enough.
|
| Now volunteers find out from court documents that w.org is
| "Matt's personal website" as he puts it.
|
| Additionally, now many volunteers are banned from the thing
| they helped build simply for voicing disagreement with his
| actions which are almost universally accepted as unethical.
| Many have been banned for reacting to one of his post with
| with disapproving emojji!!
|
| Matt has built up the foundation through deception and then
| weaponised it.
| graeme wrote:
| >My personal take on this has to do entirely with how the
| decision to block WP Engine access to WordPress.org, unless
| they were willing to pay for it, was arrived at.
|
| Matt would be allowed to charge for access to Wordpress.org.
| It's his property. What you can't do is:
|
| make a service publicly available and then threaten a company
| that it needs exclusive terms
|
| In the lawsuit the judge asked Automattic to come up with a
| price for access to Wp.org and Matt did not provide an
| estimate.
|
| >we think we're going to need either ask that you setup local
| mirrors, or we can maybe arrange a pay as you go deal.
|
| In the lawsuit Automattic asked the judge to force WPengine
| to shut down their mirrors. They want control over the
| system. Which is also legit, but legally you can't offer
| public terms for all and then threaten a company with "the
| nuclear option" unless they agree to a separate set of terms
| for 8% of revenue.
|
| Wordpress.org could have terms that allow companies to setup
| mirrors, but they explicitly don't want this, and
| wordpress.org is hardcoded into Wordpress Core.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| > In the lawsuit the judge asked Automattic to come up with
| a price for access to Wp.org and Matt did not provide an
| estimate.
|
| Automattic and Mullenweg argued that WP Engine should be
| required file a bond of $1.6 million to ensure that they
| are compensated for potential costs and damages if it's
| later found that the preliminary injunction was granted
| without sufficient basis.
|
| https://www.searchenginejournal.com/judge-sides-with-wp-
| engi...
| voytec wrote:
| > But I think people who know or are close to him should
| seriously consider an intervention.
|
| They tried and got cut. He's dropping anyone who's trying to
| help due to difference of opinion. Someone "suffering" from
| Narcissistic Personality Disorder[0] is making everyone around
| such person suffer and feels great. It's worse than
| schizophrenia - such person feels god-like 100% of the time. No
| downtime, zero doubt about their righteousness.
|
| Think: Trump, Putin, Musk, Gaddafi, Bezos, Jong-un, Bolsonaro.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disor...
| refulgentis wrote:
| Not a mental breakdown, but, a memento mori for all of us:
|
| The problem with success is even when success is a reality,
| it's effects are temporary.
|
| You get hungry even though you have just eaten.
|
| The most telling moment for understanding what's going was Matt
| responding to successful critics by saying they weren't
| successful enough
|
| I can't remember exactly what he said, & too much has happened
| for me to find it with 5 minutes of Googling. Something like
| "oh yeah well you only got to $2B valuation and it took 1000
| engineers, what do you know"
|
| If there is a breakdown here, it's one I've seen before, but
| wasn't cognizant of until I saw it 100x over at Google,
| sometimes tragically: you got everything you thought you
| wanted, but you're bored enough to need a new challenge, but
| you're not cognizant enough of it to effectively make that
| choice _before_ your actions show you that you need to.
|
| Doesn't help any that it would amount to "backing down" in this
| scenario, he can't say that now without people thinking he was
| forced out somehow.
|
| When I think about this, I also remember:
|
| - the somewhat odd acquisitions over the past few years,
| Tumblr, that one cross-platform messaging app that got a ton of
| press for insisting they'd do iMessage....another strong
| indicator of boredom with the day-to-day, IMHO.
|
| - His clear, repeated, focus is on money. It's never in primary
| focus, but it's _always_ there, in _everything_ lashing out
| that is publicized. If you 're unhappy, and you're not sure
| why, and you have everything you _thought_ you wanted, one easy
| thought train to jump on is "the compensation is not
| commensurate for the work"
| wordofx wrote:
| He has investors to answer to. He has an over evaluation that
| unless he grows the value of his company he's screwed. He's
| trying to pull in revenue and he's destroying a competitor to
| take their customers.
| mfer wrote:
| According to crunchbase, Automattic has taken just shy of $1B
| in funding. Yes, that's a B as in billion.
|
| I wonder where those investors are on returns on that
| investment and the kinds of changes they want to get them.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| > unless he grows the value of his company he's screwed
|
| What are the consequences, exactly?
| brendanyounger wrote:
| I suspect they gave him a timeline to IPO and/or sell or
| he's kicked out as CEO. His recent actions are those of a
| man with a deadline and nothing to lose.
| danudey wrote:
| Assuming that is the case: WordPress the company only
| needs to stay stable and valuable until everything goes
| through; if it burns down after that he's still met his
| obligations (to an extent).
| larodi wrote:
| Or perhaps is suffering from realization that there's no free
| lunch on this planet and sometimes it is paid for with drama
| and even very very rare one may get to be the one who calls the
| shots. Question is whether one is in position to pull it up
| when one needs to take the credit back.
|
| He seems do be doing fine, though, perhaps also is having the
| time of his life, nothing wrong from perspective of other for-
| profit projects. Wonder who promised this and how was it
| guaranteed it'd not happen at some point?
|
| Besides LLMs be soon spitting 'wordpress retold' with Cursor
| and all, and he may have just realized it.
| ismail wrote:
| If was running a major site that depends on Wordpress , or am
| an agency that makes use of Wordpress extensively I would be
| very concerned. Irrespective of who is right/wrong, Matt's
| actions come across as rash, irrational , and reactive.
|
| Definitely not the type of leader I would want to be leading an
| open source project I depend on.
|
| From a risk analysis perspective, this would make me question
| if wp is fit for my company. If the ceo/leader can behave in
| this way , what are the risks he pulls similarly self
| destructive moves that jeopardises my sites?
|
| I am have no bone in this fight, I dropped wp back In 2010, due
| to the multitude of issues with plugins, themes and security.
| It was easier(and more secure) to roll an app with
| django/rails.
|
| Though, I think if you are using Wordpress. Either look for
| alternatives , or look to a fork with better governance.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| Stimulants are a heck of a drug.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| he's not wrong about the fears, he's just reacting in a
| terrible way
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I don't think it's a symptom of a mental breakdown. I think
| it's a symptom of highly successful tech people who, over time,
| get more enclosed by a "yes-men" bubble and start to think
| their shit don't stink so much that they then actually start to
| lose touch with what most of us call "reality". You might call
| that "a mental breakdown", I call that being an asshole.
|
| Over the past 5 years or so, I've start becoming numb to all of
| the tech leaders who I used to hold in high regard who I now
| think are just the boring epitome of self-involved douchebags,
| e.g. Musk and Andreesen, for example. It just looks like
| garden-variety power intoxication to me.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Now it seems like the community needs to take over, but
| Mullenweg still holds all the keys.
|
| This move by Matt to pull out of development all but guarantees a
| fork. The biggest argument against was the work that Automattic
| was putting into WordPress would be very hard to replicate in a
| new project. But if the community is going to be expected to do
| ~all of the work anyway, there's no reason to do that work inside
| Matt's personal fiefdom.
| frereubu wrote:
| Has he said he was going to pull out of development? I hadn't
| read that anywhere in all of this.
| lolinder wrote:
| https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-
| spons...
|
| > Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus
| on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as
| WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce.
| Members of the "community" have said that working on these
| sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress.
|
| > As part of this reset, Automattic will match its
| volunteering pledge with those made by WP Engine and other
| players in the ecosystem, or about 45 hours a week that
| qualify under the Five For the Future program as benefitting
| the entire community and not just a single company. These
| hours will likely go towards security and critical updates.
|
| 5 of those 45 hours are apparently the Executive Director of
| WordPress.org, so this is actually one full time developer
| working on WP. That is effectively pulling out, and the
| remaining time supposedly allocated should be very easy for a
| fork to replace.
|
| Gotta love the scare quotes around "community".
| hn8726 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Automattic announced that it would restrict its
| contributions to the open source version of WordPress. The
| company would now only put in about 45 hours a week total --
| down from nearly 4,000 a week -- so as to match the estimated
| hourly contributions of WP Engine.
|
| source: https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-
| automattics-spons...
| frereubu wrote:
| Ah I see, I thought you were talking about him personally.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Are you under the impression he himself has been a
| meaningful contributor in the last decade?
| frereubu wrote:
| I thought I read a comment somewhere in all of this where
| he said that he was actually doing coding, yes, but (a) I
| could well be mistaken and (b) he could well have been
| talking rubbish.
| greenthrow wrote:
| I think you misinterpreted him funding development. Read
| the linked article. Should clear you up. He was funding
| (via Automattic) an estimated 4k+ hours of work per week
| and is cutting that back to 45. Not himself coding but
| people that work for him.
| esskay wrote:
| He doesn't actually do any development himself at all.
| IIRC his last commit was something like 15 years ago.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >down from nearly 4,000 a week
|
| Do they really pay that many people to work on development?
| That's 100 fulltime jobs.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| It does seem like throwing investor money at 4000hrs/week
| open source development was a ZIRP
| 65 wrote:
| Hmm, crazy narcissist Matt Mullenweg does something for attention
| at the detriment of everyone else, again?
|
| The problem is that there's a bit of a black hole in CMSs right
| now where you need developers who want to work on the CMS and
| ordinary users who can host/create content on the CMS. Strapi was
| almost there, but alas, headless is not going to cut it for your
| average business trying to make a website.
|
| Static site generators can be too limited and simple, Drupal is
| not particularly user friendly, and tons of other CMSs don't have
| enough plugins for marketers to cram into their sites.
|
| Anyone considering e-commerce now will probably use Shopify
| instead of WooCommerce. Site builders like Squarespace and Wix
| are good for simpler sites but not for multi-author news type
| sites.
|
| I feel like the only option is a fork at this point.
| hoofhearted wrote:
| I've been working on a side hobby project for a year in an
| attempt to solve these problems.
|
| It keeps growing in interest, and the demand has become more than
| I can handle currently.
|
| If anyone is interested in helping to build an open and secure
| platform that is an alternative to WordPress, please reach out or
| comment.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Blog about it and get it on HN?
| hoofhearted wrote:
| Yes, this is a really great start.
|
| One of my current clients recently had his WP install taken
| over, and SiteGround took it down for offensive content.
|
| It's just a basic informational website for his consulting
| business, and he never logs into it or makes changes to it.
| He has no idea how anyone hacked it.
|
| It really baffles me that this is still a thing in 2025, and
| that people can't get a basic Shopify type of experience for
| creating informational websites and blogs where they can set
| it and forget, and focus on running their business. They
| should be concerned about how their content website is
| growing their business and overall bottomline; not if they
| have been taken over with offensive content or not based off
| of basic security best practices.
| mg wrote:
| I find it an interesting question to what degree the design
| decisions of WordPress are still the right ones in 2025. A PHP
| backend and frontend running on the same machine, serving
| dynamically rendered content from a MySql database.
|
| Personally, I prefer to have my content in text files, which are
| using a DSL similar to Yaml but optimized for use in a CMS. And
| render it to static html files via Python. A process that happens
| on a different machine. The html files are then pushed to the
| server that serves the frontend.
| tqwhite wrote:
| I have never liked Wordpress. If it dies, that's ok with me. I
| just don't like it.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Could someone link to a higher-level history of the WordPress
| situation, going further back? For the benefit of those of us
| that don't know much beyond the fact that it's an established
| blogging and website-building platform?
| glenstein wrote:
| As a fellow newbie, I found this article from Josh Collinsworth
| to be a very thoughtful and clear overview. It's a bit long but
| it covers the history prior to the lawsuit.
|
| https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| The blogosphere is keeping us entertained - with meta drama about
| blogging itself as growth turns negative.
| macspoofing wrote:
| Is the entire drama that WordPress is asserting a trademark over
| 'WPEngine' (i.e. 'WP'), and WPEngine disagrees?
| csa wrote:
| > Is the entire drama that WordPress is asserting a trademark
| over 'WPEngine' (i.e. 'WP'), and WPEngine disagrees?
|
| That is a minor issue in the disagreement.
|
| The bigger issue is that WPEngine had its access to Wordpress
| cut off on very short notice for questionable reasons.
|
| This obviously had a negative impact on WPEngine's business,
| but also on all of the business that WPEngine served. I think
| the latter part is what has a lot of folks up in arms -- the
| collateral damage was real tone deaf (imho).
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| > The problem is that Mullenweg has final say over some very
| important parts of the WordPress community
|
| > THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND
| (...)
|
| I think the real issue is people being fooled with the false
| concept of 'community', times and times again.
|
| Communities do not exist in practice. What you have is a vast
| pool of users (in this case I also include plugin and theme
| devs), and a minority of core contributors, which are either
| individuals or companies, usually both. Those are driving the
| project forward and making decisions.
|
| This distribution can be applied to many open-source softwares,
| but also projects like mozilla, wikipedia, etc.
|
| People do not understand to what extend the no-guarantee of FOSS
| software is applicable. All your projects can be broken from a
| day to the next and you cannot expect any compensation.
|
| But that's ok because you got the software for free, right?
| runxel wrote:
| If you haven't yet: Now's the best time to migrate away. You
| should try out Kirby[0]. No affiliation, but this thing sparked
| my interest in web development again when I first heard about it.
|
| [0]https://getkirby.com/
| addedlovely wrote:
| I too have switched to Kirby, should have done so years ago,
| it's great to work with and fast out the box.
| eltondegeneres wrote:
| Kirby is only source-available, not open source, and requires a
| paid license for usage. I think that's a deal breaker for a lot
| of Wordpress users.
| capitanazo77 wrote:
| I would love to do a one click transfer to a static site but it's
| not easy. I've only seen Astro Wordpress kits but paid
| addedlovely wrote:
| If you're comfortable with php writing an importer for Kirby is
| simple, checkout their cli YouTube video. Nice modern api and
| easy to import content. Being flat file if there's a mistake,
| just delete the content folder and import again!
| daitangio wrote:
| Sorry I switched to hugo my https://gioorgi.com and it was easier
| than expected.
|
| Initially, I only followed the 'drama' tangentially, also because
| I have always considered myself a mere "end user" of Wordpress,
| even if long-time one (I used it for about 20 years).
|
| For me, the fact that Wordpress.com sold a service based on an
| "extended" version of Wordpress.org was never a particular
| problem, but I never thought it was illegal to compete directly
| with it by taking the open source software and offering a simple
| hosting service.
|
| Anyway I started to consider to switch from Wordpress to a static
| site hosted with hugo, retaining the comment system and all the
| URLs in the original form, more or less.
|
| I was surprised because it took very little time (less 1 week of
| total work) to migrate my articles (1000+) and the comments.
|
| I used open source tools, and I am a "hugo" newbie, so I make
| some trade off too.
|
| Never less, I suggest all of you to give a try to hugo+isso (isso
| is a comment system very light).
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| What did you use to migrate posts? I'm going to move three
| WordPress sites (15yr+ running) off soon.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Also very interested in this. I ended up paying for 2-3 years
| of WordPress.com to host my tiny-traffic blog and I had to
| pay for a higher tier to handle video (sidenote: fuck
| wordpress for offering a shitty watered-down WP version on
| WP.com, you know, literally the thing they complain about
| WPEngine doing). I'd love nothing more than to migrate away
| but I've already done a mess WP -> Hugo (or was it Jekyll?
| not sure) -> Ghost -> WP and I'd like to automate the
| migration as much as possible. Every other time I spent a
| while copy/pasting and hand-fixing posts. I know I won't get
| away from doing that completely but I'd like it be easier.
| gtsop wrote:
| Hugo is by no stretch of the imagination a drop in replacement
| for wordpress in my understanding. I understand the average joe
| uses wordpress for the UI and huge ecosystem, rather than it's
| technical capabilities (there are a million cms). Yes,
| technically speaking there is nothing preventing you from
| reimplementing everything in hugo, nothing except many months
| of labor
|
| Said differently, the person who will successfully and
| painlessly migrate wordpress to hugo is not an average case,
| but a minority.
| zo1 wrote:
| I think Matt should reach out to Elon Musk to assist him. And I
| don't mean that in a weird or snarky or "jabbing at Elon/Matt"
| kind of way. Clearly he is struggling to deal with a competitor
| and community wanting to impose their will on him, and make him
| behave like a "good boy" for their benefit (whatever that may
| be). Unfortunately he doesn't have the kind of "Fuck You" money
| that Elon has to deal with said interlopers.
| Destiner wrote:
| all this WP drama makes me really grateful about deciding to go
| with a static site generator.
|
| Astro FTW!
| breaker-kind wrote:
| this article opens with "since i last wrote about wordpress",
| with a link to a previous article. the linked article does the
| same. it goes seven layers deep! what dedication!
| GavinAnderegg wrote:
| This drama has boggled my mind since the beginning. I've been
| trying to write about the open web while trying get back into
| blogging. It's been great to have a bunch to write about, but I
| sure wish it wasn't happening!
|
| I've also been focusing on the rise of Bluesky and my move from
| extreme skepticism to tentative acceptance. That's been more
| fun to write about.
| pupppet wrote:
| Just love the way Matt keeps responding to everything in a
| passive-aggressive tone with a smarmy smile.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| I feel sorry for Matt, someone close to him (family, friend,
| partner) should help him. It's not good for him, not good for his
| company and for Wordpress. I've never used Wordpress and I prefer
| static sites where I have full control, but this doesn't mean
| that I don't recognize the usefulness end ease of it. Like many
| situation, this whole issue would be solved if a couple of the
| people involved sat down for a coffee, left their ego's outside,
| had open minds, and having the willingness to compromise and
| being sincere ;-)
| tylershuster wrote:
| I don't understand how (if?) WordPress has popularity among
| serious professionals. Extending it without plugins, many of
| which are paid, is a nightmare. Adding custom fields is
| laborious, configuring post type display modes is a slog as well.
|
| HN seems to grumble about Drupal but even if your only
| requirement is a PHP server with a MySQL database connect, Drupal
| (8+) is just as simple to set up as WordPress and infinitely
| easier to configure. Older versions may have been less user-
| friendly but really, just click "Content->Add New->Page" and
| you're already running at the speed of WordPress.
| akadruid1 wrote:
| Wordpress is clunky but it never broke backwards compatibility.
|
| HN grumbles about Drupal because many got burnt by picking the
| wrong horse. Drupal was the biggest CMS in the world and like a
| safe bet until they told their users they would have to rewrite
| their 7 code to go to 8 and their users decided they would
| rewrite to WordPress[1]. Drupal never regained the trust they
| lost. They extended the life of d7 over and over but never made
| a compelling replacement. To this day, 7 is still more widely
| deployed than 8,9 or 10 ever were[2].
|
| I think it's interesting to observe the fate that Python 3
| narrowly avoided. Python 3 wasn't a compelling replacement
| until at least 3.5. In a nearly parallel universe they're all
| using torch.rb instead of pytorch.
|
| [1]https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/did-breaking-
| backward...
|
| [2]https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/drupal
| tylershuster wrote:
| That's a fair argument. Maybe I'm just biased because I
| started with Drupal 8.
| tootie wrote:
| It's the same way products like salesforce become popular.
| Network effects. As much it's an architectural nightmare, it is
| a thing that everyone is familiar with. When you are looking at
| ecommerce tools, email marketing, analytics, etc they all have
| some kind of one-click integration with wordpress. If you need
| developers, wordpress freelancers are a dime a dozen. It's just
| the thing everybody knows.
| ggm wrote:
| Hate the codebase, don't mind the front-end mostly. A
| compatible SQL schema rewrite in a different language with
| lower exposure to risk, and some of the auth issues resolved, I
| think a lot of people would shift camp.
|
| I have seen national broadsheets using WP as their publish
| engine. How they actually write copy and approve the article
| stream might be another matter.
| donohoe wrote:
| >> Extending it without plugins, many of which are paid, is a
| nightmare.
|
| Many of are free, and you can often build your own. You can
| easily extend it without plugins, but you're doing your future
| self a favor if you stuck your new features in one (so you can
| update themes etc easily in the future).
|
| >> Adding custom fields is laborious, configuring post type
| display modes is a slog as well.
|
| Hard disagree here. Whether you are using ACF for custom fields
| or post types, doing it manually takes more time but is not
| that difficult. Its typically a set of actions you wouldn't do
| often either.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Good. As I've said in other threads. There are other projects,
| other CMSes that are perfectly capable of taking over. Let the
| Wordpress monopoly die and with it this crazy man's tirades.
| gjvc wrote:
| some good news for a change
| asdfman123 wrote:
| It seems that this is definitely a pressing issue for the web
| kmeisthax wrote:
| > Then yesterday happened. Automattic announced that it would
| restrict its contributions to the open source version of
| WordPress. The company would now only put in about 45 hours a
| week total -- down from nearly 4,000 a week -- so as to match the
| estimated hourly contributions of WP Engine. This action is
| blamed on the "the legal attacks started by WP Engine and funded
| by Silver Lake", which I think is a gross mischaracterization. WP
| Engine definitely did not start this.
|
| WP Engine owns several WordPress plugin developers. Does plugin
| development not count now?
| burnte wrote:
| > WP Engine owns several WordPress plugin developers. Does
| plugin development not count now?
|
| Mullenweg stole the Custom fields plugin from WPEngine. So no,
| plugin development doesn't could when he can steal the plugin
| away from you.
| Tokkemon wrote:
| Just this week I needed to completely revamp my personal website.
| I went with Squarespace because it's quick to spin up and I don't
| have to fiddle with tons of plugins and a complicated theme
| ecosystem. I just need a website that works. I used to use
| Wordpress for all my previous iterations, but now, it's done. Sad
| to see it become obsolete by not fixing them broader business and
| user-friendliness problems.
| anonnon wrote:
| A silver lining is that if fewer sites use WordPress, the web
| won't look nearly as homogeneous as it does now.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Automattic vs. WP Engine will be ultimately decided in court but
| this sort of reminds me of Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.[0]
| when Oracle got mad because of Google cashing out hard with
| Android. It's all about money for Matt....not about WordPress or
| open source community.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....
| lakomen wrote:
| TL;DR?
|
| I don't like drama. Why is it in trouble just now and it has not
| been an ongoing process?
| tommek4077 wrote:
| No it is not. Outside this strange bubble on hacker news, no ine
| really cares or has ever heard of the creator.
|
| They just use wordpress.
| joshchernoff wrote:
| Good many then these stupid bot will leave my server alone always
| looking for wp-config FML.
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