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.
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.
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.
You have to check the box to log in if you want to delete your account
Do you condemn WordpressEngine?!
Condemn, renounce AND denounce !
They make bank off open source, undermine the business model of the company that does most of the development while only giving back minor contributions back.
** Church organ music intensifies...
"I do renounce him."
Priest: and all his works?
"I do renounce them." “I’m not affiliated with WP Engine” is this nerd generation’s “I’m 18 or older, let me in.”
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.
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 mean these all sound like textbook qualities of enshittification. Everyone hates WP but begrudgingly uses it anyway. WP doesn't care that their reputation is in the toilet because people still give them money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who membas phpnuke
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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 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).
I assume people will actually leave to other platforms, maybe Ghost, maybe Hugo or Jekyll.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
