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Tumblr to move its half a billion blogs to WordPress
(techcrunch.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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Given how crufty Wordpress is, I don't even dare to imagine how bad the Tumblr backend must be that this is seen as an improvement by the developers.
Right? At this point I'm just sticking with WordPress because I can't be bothered to migrate a bunch of sites off of it. Every year for the past decade it's felt jankier. Tumblr's backend has to be a dumpster fire for this to seem like a good idea.
My criticism aside, WP still has the convenience factor of being the open source web platform that has a plugin for just about any need. Whether those plugins are gonna break for site or introduce interesting new vulnerabilities is a different discussion.
Same boat here. I had some good times with it but these days it seems to be a bloated mess. Are there any good, lightweight alternatives these days?
I’ve been looking off and on for a few months, but it seems like there aren’t many options anymore like there were 20 years ago. A couple I’ve found are FlatPress and WriteFreely, but I haven’t tried any yet.
Depends on what exactly you want to host. If you want commercially-hosted stuff, I'd stick with wordpress or whatever your host offers, but if you're selfhosting I'd look in !selfhosted@lemmy.world or https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#blogging-platforms.
I suppose what I'm looking for is a lightweight, multi-user CMS, with support for both static pages and a blog. If the blog could support (at least one-way) federation that'd be a bonus. It should ideally be built to work with both desktop and mobile devices (so that I can customise the look rather than build it from scratch).
It's something I could build from scratch but if I can do it then I'm sure lots of more skilled people have done it better!
When I dug into this for myself I landed on Ghost!
https://ghost.org/
I suppose at some point I should learn Node.js and other JS-related stuff. I speak vanilla JS but I've not really touched frameworks. Anyway, thank you for the recommendation.
There are Fediverse blog platforms but, as this is about Tumblr, what about a Fediverse tumbleblog? You've got:
Wordpress is all of those except lightweight, though I wouldn't really say it's a bear to manage either. I believe they have initial activitypub support as well.
You can check the selfhosted list for alternatives, but I don't think I've seen one that would be a better fit.
I mostly find the design of WP clunky as all hell. I'd like to add some features to my site and doing so feels tremendously awkward. Learning how to implement stuff in their way of doing things doesn't feel worthwhile to me, I guess.
You're not alone, I've still got clients with WP sites and it feels more and more patchworky every time I use it. The vulnerabilities may keep me up at night, but it would take a ton of effort to move them over, and my clients certainly don't want to pay for that.
I see this all the time. People complain about WP but think the alternatives are better, when they're just trading problems for others.
WP core is stable AF. I've shared in many prior comments how I spend so many more dev hours fixing other CMSes over WP.
And if you don't even need a CMS, fuck it all and switch to static hosting and markdown.
Oh yeah, for sure. Joomla still haunts my dreams.
All of my own sites are static because it's easy for me to modify. But my clients need something a bit more user friendly, unfortunately.
This smells to me like WordPress reducing their workload more than anything since they own Tumblr (unless maybe there's some sort of financial incentive to increasing the number of WordPress blogs?).
But also, considering that at one point in Tumblr's history, you could edit other people's posts, maybe it is an improvement.
What 😭
So the way Tumblr works is that your account is basically a blog, with your home page on the site being populated with posts from the accounts that you follow. You can reblog posts onto your own account and comment on them to create individual conversation threads like this one. At one point, there was a bug in the edit post system that let you edit the entirety of a post when you reblogged it, including what other people had said previously, and even the original post. This would only affect your specific reblog of it, of course, but you could edit a post to say something completely different from the original and create a completely unrelated comment chain.
John green sends his regards
I don't remember that. He had his posts edited, or he edited someone else's posts?
Doesn't he have a funny username, like "FishingBoatProceeds" or something?
It makes sense.
Supporting Tumblr backend with patches vs building on top of stable WP and improving it seems like a win win.
Tumblr's backend has been passed between several companies* for several decades, it's a miracle it still works and can be updated
*some of which don't even know what tumblr is
Could you elaborate?
Wordpress is a pile of decades old php code* that is held together with string and tape pretty much.
*php isn't the problem itself, modern php is actually pretty nice.
I'll take your word for it. Apparently tumblr and WordPress (and WordPress.com) are owned by the same company, so this change would make sense to reduce maintenance workload.
WordPress core is pretty wild. But modern WordPress isn't working purely in that. The latest WP uses PHP primarily as a backend, and modern JS as a frontend and passing data through filters->DB.
I won't call it elegant. But it's not the PHP experience from five years ago.
And despite all that it's likely that the Tumblr backend might be even worse.