There are two types of WordPress sites from my perspective as someone who got their start in webdev in that ecosystem.
The first and arguably largest is exactly what you describe. Little sites for small businesses who just want an online presence and maybe to facilitate some light duty business development with a small webshop or forum. These sites are done by fly by night marketers who are also hawking SEO optimization and ads on Facebook and they’ll host your site for the low low price of $100/mo while dodging your phone calls when the godaddy $5/mo plan they are actually hosting your site on shits the bed.
The second, and more influential group of WordPress users, are very large organizations who publish a lot of content and need something that is flexible, reasonably scalable and cheap to hire developers for. Universities love WP because they can setup multisite and give every student in every class a website with some basic plugins and then it’s handsoff. Go look at the logo list for WordPress VIP to see what media organizations are powered by WP. Legit newsrooms run on mostly stock WP backends but with their own designers and some custom publishing workflows.
These two market segments are so far apart though that it creates a lot of division and friction from lots of different angles. Do you cater to the small businesses and just accept that they’ll outgrow the platform someday? Or do you build stuff that makes the big publishers happy because the pay for most of the engineering talent working on the open source project more generally? And all that while maintaining backwards compatibility and somewhat trying to keep up with modern-ish practices (they did adopt React after all).
WordPress is weird and in no way a monoculture is what I guess I’m trying to say.
4) Don't use a stack of plugins, if you must use any keep them as dumb as possible and stick to those with a longstanding reputation.
A basic instance, set to auto-update, installed on a shared webhost where OS/web server updates are someone else's problem is pretty foolproof. A VPS running a long-term distro set to auto update is almost as good.
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That said I personally dropped Wordpress for static site generation years ago because I realized I didn't actually need any of the dynamic features and wasn't using the WYSIWYG editor. Now I write Markdown in to a file in a git repo and then trigger a regeneration whenever I update it.
This is the main reason why WordPress is so popular still to this day. You can cache the crap out of the frontend to the point that it’s basically a static site at that point but then it’s still all running on top of a dynamic platform if you need that flexibility in the future.
I got my start in webdev slinging WordPress sites like a lot of self taught devs and I definitely see the pain points now that I’ve moved on to more “engineering” focused development paradigms but the value proposition of WP has always been clear and present.
Given how WP leadership is all over the place at the moment, I can see how Cloudflare sees this as an opportunity to come in and peel away some market share when they can convince these current WP devs to adopt a little AI help and write applications for their platform instead.
Vue uses signals for reactivity now and has for years. Alien signals was discovered by a Vue contributor. Vue 3.6 (now in alpha/beta?) will ship a version that is essentially a Vue flavored Svelte with extreme fine grained reactivity based on a custom compiler step.
One of the reasons Vue has such a loyal community is because the framework continues to improve performance without forcing you to adopt new syntax every 18 months because the framework authors got bored.
It’s not about stressing yourself out; that’s something you can ultimately control (though admittedly, many people are bad at separating the two) but more about _how good you are at putting on a show_ of giving a shit.
There is a non zero chance that the company I work for pivots into some weird crypto niche (low, but we’re already fintech-y). If that happens, I’m out, but no way in hell am I gonna pivot my work personality overnight because of a business decision made by the company’s board and investors.
If I need to put on a happy face for my boss to keep my job, then I’m gonna do it because I can’t afford not to at the moment. That’s not to say there is no line, but being a generally positive person in the workplace is a role I’m fine with playing. It costs me very little personally and opens a lot of doors because let’s face it, nobody likes working with a loathsome human being, even if they’re right.
Am I a sucker? Maybe by your definition, but I don’t feel like one currently.
This is how it should be for internal stuff! Corporate IT wants everyone to update anyway so there really isn’t a downside.
One thing I kinda understand is users who want to use a more performant browser (safari really does sip memory I’ve found compared to chrome) but that’s kind of a side point. But if your company decides this is the browser(s) we support, then it makes sense and is the right way to go about it.
You say that, but isn't Vercel also a Void(0) investor in a roundabout way?
The big news regarding Void Cloud is that it all seems to be built on Cloudflare workers. The landing page is very light on info atm too. [0]
I am super excited that they are MIT open sourcing Vite+ however. In that realm, they are obviously targeting Bun as their main competition. Unfortunately for Bun, if they are forced to help Anthropic more than they can focus on OSS, they might lose their current (perceived?) advantage.
Well, your original comment was about a war brewing between Vervel and Void0. If Accel has a stake in both, I don’t know that they really care. See the Laravel investment as well.
Accel sees the money in vendor lock-in and is so far willing to let these companies fund their open source endeavors and sell hosting as a means to an end. Im not sure we’ve seen the real end game here yet but with geopolitics raising the cost of energy a ton this year, perhaps some screws are going to begin being tightened as margins are reduced. At present, I think its too early to tell.
Assuming you use sqlite in prod or are willing to take the L if some minor db difference breaks prod...
This method is actually super popular in the PHP world, but people get themselves into trouble if they tidy up all the footguns that stock sqlite leaves behind for you (strict types being a big one).
Also, when you get a certain size of database, certain operations can become hideously slow (and that can change depending on the engine as well) but if you're running a totally different database for your test suite, it's one more thing that is different.
I do recognize that these are niche problems for healthy companies that can afford to solve them, so ymmv.
We've had this exact same issue (clean db for every test) - the way we solved it was with ZFS snapshots - just snapshot a directory of our data (databases, static assets, etc) - and the OS will automatically create a copy-on-write replica that can be written to, and the modification can be just thrown away (or preserved).
Once you've created a zfs snapshot, everything else is basically instant and costs very little perf.
When push comes to shove, software can usually be fudged. Unlike a building or a water treatment plant where the first fuck up could mean that people die.
I like to think that people writing actual mission critical software try their absolute best to get it right before shipping and that the rest our industry exists in a totally separate world where a bug in the code is just actually not that big of a deal. Yeah, it might be expensive to fix, but usually it can be reverted or patched with only an inconvenience to the user and to the business.
It’s like the fines that multinational companies pay when breaking the law. If it’s a cost of doing business, it’s baked into the price of the product.
You see this also in other industries. OSHA violations on a residential construction site? I bet you can find a dozen if you really care to look. But 99% of the time, there are no consequences big enough for people to care so nobody wears their PPE because it “slows them down” or “makes them less nimble”. Sound familiar?
I like to think that people writing actual mission critical software try their absolute best to get it right before shipping.
People try, but the only fundamentally different part is that you spend time thinking about and documenting your process rather than just doing it. There's always one more bug. Usually there ends up being a human covering up for the system's failures somewhere that no one else notices. That's the driver in the car, or the factory tech who adjusts things just a bit.
And from slightly different view. What we make is not output of modern mass production. With highly tuned and most of time perfectly matching parts build into one unit.
Instead we make pre-mass production bespoke products where each part is slightly filled and fitted together from bunch of random components. Say the barrel can't be changed between two different handguns. We just have magic technology to replicate the single gun multiple times. Does not mean it is actually mass-produced in sense say our current power tools are.
The first and arguably largest is exactly what you describe. Little sites for small businesses who just want an online presence and maybe to facilitate some light duty business development with a small webshop or forum. These sites are done by fly by night marketers who are also hawking SEO optimization and ads on Facebook and they’ll host your site for the low low price of $100/mo while dodging your phone calls when the godaddy $5/mo plan they are actually hosting your site on shits the bed.
The second, and more influential group of WordPress users, are very large organizations who publish a lot of content and need something that is flexible, reasonably scalable and cheap to hire developers for. Universities love WP because they can setup multisite and give every student in every class a website with some basic plugins and then it’s handsoff. Go look at the logo list for WordPress VIP to see what media organizations are powered by WP. Legit newsrooms run on mostly stock WP backends but with their own designers and some custom publishing workflows.
These two market segments are so far apart though that it creates a lot of division and friction from lots of different angles. Do you cater to the small businesses and just accept that they’ll outgrow the platform someday? Or do you build stuff that makes the big publishers happy because the pay for most of the engineering talent working on the open source project more generally? And all that while maintaining backwards compatibility and somewhat trying to keep up with modern-ish practices (they did adopt React after all).
WordPress is weird and in no way a monoculture is what I guess I’m trying to say.
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