The board needs to oust the CEO.
“Matt’s war against WP Engine has been polarizing and upsetting for everyone in WordPress, but most of the WP community has been relatively insulated from any real effects. Putting a loyalty test in the form of a checkmark on the WordPress.org login page has brought the conflict directly to every community member and contributor. Matt is not just forcing everyone to take sides, he is actively telling people to consult attorneys to determine whether or not they should check the box,” the anonymous contributor I spoke to told me. “It is also more than just whether or not you agree to a legally dubious statement to log in. A growing number of active, dedicated community members, many who have no connection with WP Engine, have had their WordPress.org accounts completely disabled with no notice or explanation as to why. No one knows who will be banned next or for what… Whatever Matt’s end goal is, his ‘tactics,’ especially this legally and ethically ambiguous checkbox, are causing a lot of confusion and mental anguish to people around the world.”
This is the sort of behavior that causes irreparable damage to a brand. Psycho.
What a weird thing to do! They can sue each other until the cows come home for all I care but dragging the community into it like this comes off as petty imo. Musky even.
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i did just that a few minutes ago. closed my account and removed my one Plugin from the repo. if the statistics in wordpress.org are correct it was used by ~20k sites (though that number is hard to believe and seemed way too large for the usw case for a long time). It can still be found in github but will no longer get any updates since I haven’t used wordpress myself for quite some time and with the current shitstorm i don’t see a reason to invest any time in it.
Based on entries to his personal blog and social media posts, Mullenweg has been on safari in Africa this week. Mullenweg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cherry on top, lmao. Of course he’s off doing rich white CEO things.
Homeboy going to shoot a Giraffe for the trophy room.
This whole thing just makes me want to steer clear of wordpress entirely.
I’m not sure what in the history of WordPress would have encouraged anyone to do otherwise.
The efficient and clean code? /s
We’re pressing words here. I can’t think of a way to do that without a mangled heap of PHP, can you?
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I’ve been using WP for personal projects for something like 15 years.
Nothing I’ve ever created has been that big, but I generally liked the tools nonetheless.
But now I think I’m out. I try to adhere to a rule where I don’t support rich weirdos as much as possible, and as such that’s why I use Lemmy to begin with. And don’t buy from Amazon. And don’t use Twitter any more. Etc.
So my next project now will totally be on new software. And hey, maybe I won’t have to use PHP ever again so this could be a win.
Don’t judge PHP by what you saw in WordPress. Modern PHP is amazing, WordPress had horrible code when it started and they definitely didn’t fix things afterwards. It’s a horrible slow mess of a code. Look at some modern PHP (for example this api of mine ) to compare.
Thanks for sharing a modern php codebase. It makes me confident that giving it up and switching to Python was the right choice.
lol
Ah enjoy your single thread. I’ll be there writing writing kick ass code in rust and wondering about important stuff like… err… who owns that fucking variable…
Cool story. Rust didn’t exist when I switched from php to Python.
Imagine going to the slowest and ugliest interpreted language there is and feeling superior about it.
Like, modern Python is basically what PHP was at its lowest point, PHP 4 (20 years ago).
No, it’s worse. PHP never had shit like virtual environments and a million different incompatible package managers.
Virtual environments are a great thing.
I’d argue that the concept of isolated environments is great. Python’s implementation… leaves something to be desired.
It’s still a bit hacky, even in Python 3. Tools like
uvandpdmexist in the gaps to smooth it out.That said, it’s something that the core community is actively working on and it’s not something users will face day to day.
I say this as someone who moved from PHP 3 to Python 2 to Ruby to PHP 6+ to Python 3 as their goto language over the years.
Hahahahaha. Are you seriously defending crap like __autoload and package management built on top of that hack?
Mojo is what is keeping me vindicated that python was a good choice. That and it’s worked for every project I’ve ever used it for lol
But that’s small potatoes in the technologist game
The best tool is the best tool for the job. My php code was immaculate - import header, write your content, import footer. I wrote it all in a few hours, and I think my university is still using it today. One of my proudest moments was when a team member whose abilities I respected gushed over how easy my code was to work with
I haven’t used it since.
I’m led to believe modern PHP has become pretty good. It’s also never been the right tool for the job since then
Mojo sounds incredible - python is a beautifully consistent language, and I’ve written a shit load of it. I like it a lot. It’s often not the right tool for the job, but mojo promises to turn it into something extraordinary that shores up its weaknesses… It’s just promises so far though, I really hope they pan out
But always ask yourself - what’s the right tool for the job?
Nice code, good job!
Have you tried Ghost?
Have you tried static site generators like Hugo?
I tried both. Static site generators are great for me, but when I have collaborators, they need a an admin dashboard or something with a graphical interface for editing the looks and/or content. Ghost is great but lacking features. Just saw Concrete5 in this thread, looks promising.
I’m out of the loop, what is WP Engine and why is the rich weirdo in control of WordPress being so weird about it?
WordPress is open source, there’s a foundation and stuff. The Matt Mullenweg, the guy that started the software and CEO of Automatic (which is the main company) is super upset that WP Engine (another company) is using the software without contributing much to the foundation.
I mean it’s a valid gripe, but there’s not much anyone can do about it. But Matt Mullenweg is, like you say, being super weird about it.
Luckily I moved to Hugo static site generator 3 years ago… peweff… I love PHP, but boy Wordpress was going down hill back then. And still is to this day. Introducing “features” nobody asked for. And at the same time makes your site slow.
As someone that made enough money to make a freelance career from moving people off of awful WordPress sites, WP’s reputation has been in the toilet for a decade, easily. The CMS market has been strong for a long time, and there are countless better options out there.
With the push towards API backends and static sites, WP should have died years ago. I still cannot believe it’s so popular.
Which other options would you recommend?
If you want a standard CMS, you can’t really go wrong with Umbraco. Some people are turned off by .NET, but for developer experience alone it’s the best I’ve ever worked with.
There are many good choices, if you’re looking for something more lightweight. Kirby, IndieKit, Concrete5, even Ghost are all solid. I also remember hearing about ClassicPress a while back, that was a fork of WP made during some technical and business decisions that some in the community didn’t agree with - never used it though, and it’s a fork of a time when the WP codebase was a joke.
Isn’t Umbraco the one that struggled loading a page that didn’t exist, taking several seconds to load the PageNotFound page and causing very high CPU load in the meantime? Like, an issue they had for years?
Somehow I don’t have great faith in that solution, but perhaps it’s improved in recent years.
Maybe? I can’t say I had noticed that issue before, but it’s possible.
.NET? … yea no … if you really need a CMS, try https://ghost.org/
It’s not early 2000’s Slashdot. .NET and C# have been solid choices for software development for years, and Umbraco in particular is open source and probably the most welcoming CMS I’ve known when it comes to contributions.
.NET & C# is still all coming from Microsoft. Since I don’t use Microsoft products or Windows, I never liked C#. I know there are now maybe open-source and support under Linux, I will never forget. I will never forgive. NO!
Not quite. .NET is owned by the .NET Foundation, and while it’s heavily influenced by Microsoft, it’s an independent entity. C# is owned by Microsoft, but frankly they’ve put together what was even then far more advanced than anything Java could do even now.
To be blunt, back in the 2000’s it was this exact mentality that pushed me towards C#. Instead of people bitching and starting holy wars about Java, Ruby, and other languages, the .NET community just quietly got on with things and built some fantastic tooling. Furthermore, it was one of the communities that helped me go from hapless junior to someone able to give technical talks on what I had learned, or even speak to giants in the industry like Jon Skeet.
I notice you didn’t mention Drupal or Joomla, and last time I did any webdev (11 years ago as an intern) it seemed like those were some of the big ones (though my perspective was probably very limited back then). Are they no good, have they fallen out of favour?
I actually used Drupal a year ago, so it’s definitely still around! Joomla isn’t a name I’ve heard for a while though. To be fair, I mostly work in AI now, so I’m removed from the web dev world also.
I think flat file and API based CMS’s have become more popular now, especially with many people questioning why so many CMS’s were built on relational data stores for largely non-relational data. For many, the ability to drop a CMS in and have it “just work” is why some of the newer ones are growing in popularity.
Drupal scales well and is very extensible with features that allow complicated permissions systems, etc. I have built some complicated courseware with it, and big document archives, etc. It has a skilled developer community. I wouldn’t use it for small inexpensive sites, but it’s top tier and free/liberated.
Joomla’s code a decade ago was so inefficient and clunky to work with I could never recommend it, my main interaction with it was troubleshooting and helping folks escape it. Maybe it’s improved.
I can recommend Grav as a flatfile CMS for those use-cases where the site is 90% static, the customer just wants to get able to sometimes update some of the content.
Who membas phpnuke
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WP is so bad that I got hired to help a client set up their site. They had a GoDaddy prebuilt site and wanted to migrate to a GoDaddy WooCommerce page so they could add a loyalty program.
WooCommerce is awful. It was making its own product variants, assigned changes that no one asked for to users that were asleep during the time, and took days for her to load 400 products in their database with the import feature.
It was like it was intentionally bad to push people who don’t know any better into buying an $80 plugin.
“I’m not affiliated with WP Engine” is this nerd generation’s “I’m 18 or older, let me in.”
I was thinking more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Privacy_Act
I run a WordPress site but I’m not a developer.
It seems like automatticuses the community for free development and profits from it. They in turn develop and support it, heck they created it.
However, with foss its free for WP engine to use and they dont like it. So they are throwing a hissy fit and making out its about the community and giving back. BS.
I assume it will fork.
I assume people will actually leave to other platforms, maybe Ghost, maybe Hugo or Jekyll.
I think not even Automattic so much as Matt is the one mad about WP Engine. Maybe a few others there more closely involved with the code. Almost a decade ago I tried out for a support role there. Most people seemed pretty chill but he struck me as a bit odd (not that I interacted with him but I was present for a few company All Hands).
Fork or CEO getting booted out in 3… 2… 1…
Personally I’d love to see the CEO thrown out. Maybe then Tumblr will benefit as well.
And PocketCasts. Of all the things in this whole mess that surprised me what what Automaticc owned. I had no idea they owned some of my favorite things.
I remember when I thought Matt’s awfulness was only going to affect Tumblr, how naive of me
I’d just like to point out that WordPress is GPL, so anyone could do whatever they want with the code, including Auttomatic. If people using the software in a way that, although uncool, is totally something they agreed to, the best bet would be to leave WordPress as-is and spin continued development into a new product with a new license. Would people like it? No. Do people like this, though? Hell no.
The GPL is not a “whatever” license.
No, but it’s basically a “I can use it to build my billion-dollar business and keep the profits if I want” license. The only real catch is that if I decide to modify the code and distribute it, I’m required by the license to share those changes with whoever gets the modified version. There’s nothing in the GPL that stops me from being a downstream freeloader, and I can stay on whatever version I like—no one’s forcing me to update to newer ones with terms I don’t agree with. Forking and modifying for my own needs is totally fine, as long as I slap the same GPL on the changes if I hand them out.
I’m gonna start checking out Ghost, at this point. This is ridiculous.
And if Ghost doesn’t work, then ClassicPress it is.
Welp I’m done, just started talking to my clients about moving to SquareSpace.
Imagine thinking moving from a FOSS self-hosted software to proprietary SaaS shit is an upgrade lmao
I lived through the time when every other website was a malware farm because of that POS platform.
I don’t think there is a single other piece of software that inspire me so much hate as wordpress so I’m really rooting for a complete implosion of anything WP related and that Mullenweg end up forced to sell his body for food in Pattaya.
Haven’t used anything related to Wordpress in 15 years. Seems I’ll make that a permanent decision now.
