I don't think it's the code that makes WordPress valuable. I've been learning WordPress recently and haven't been too impressed with the internals. WordPress is valuable because of the ecosystem and support. I have no doubt that WordPress will still be a thing in ten years. What's the support plan for EmDash? I see commits are mostly from a single developer.
E: Oh, I think it's an April fools joke, I'm embarrassed.
Cloudflare doesn't do April fools jokes. In fact, 1.1.1.1 was released on April 1st back in 2018 and now it's one of the most used DNS service in the world.
A little larger, a lot of the time, though I like a small initial commit better. Though just a little larger. Not so large that it is too large to show on a GitHub page. That means not using version control properly.
Usually when someone decides to share code with the world, they don't want to publish the actual development history. They publish the first version that is ready to go public as the first commit. With enough functionality etc.
> Not so large that it is too large to show on a GitHub page.
Maybe not applicable in this case, but Github has a ridiculously low threshold for when it starts hiding diffs. Probably a limitation of their new React frontend.
I hated that shit. I'd load Slashdot and there was no real content or it was difficult to find real news amongst all the crap. It's not funny. It's annoying.
Some of the april fools things can be annoying, but I have a big shrug for there being less real news for a day. Anything important will get through and most days don't have much interesting news anyway.
Would you be annoyed if HN went offline just for the hell of it for a day every year?
But you're right, I was an extremely angry person back then. Many years of therapy and deliberate ongoing work and I'm a radically different man. Thank goodness I got to the other side.
There were some years in the 90s and early 2ks that had good april fool's jokes, and that was what bubbled up. Not everyone did, so the novelty also made the "meh" ones seem better. By 2008ish everyone was doing one, and most of them weren't very good. By 2012ish marketing got involved and almost all of them were terrible and unfunny.
It was a nice tradition but, like many things, the scene got too big and corporate. It was a zombie tradition for a while then slowly faded away.
In fact when cloudflare started releasing serious things on 4/1, I found it to be a refreshing subversion of the trope.
I think you need to account for the base rate. There's a lot of WordPress plugin vulnerability disclosures because there's a lot of WordPress plugins and there are enough deployments of the plugins to make searching for those vulnerabilities is worthwhile.
That site warns that WordPress plugins can be abandoned, but that's clearly not a WordPress specific issue. Sure some site could use SSG, but that's a different design.
I certainly don't want to claim WordPress security is good, but I'm not sure that site is measuring anything meaningful.
Its impressive work from CF that lots of people in this thread are unsure whether its a joke or not, like a delicately balanced april fools for the hn crowd
wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.
yes you want a global db handle sure ya lets delete all tables woohoo
If it powers 30-50% of the web, including thousands of major websites, it works at some level.
Ivory tower "just don't use a low-cost solution" people aren't going to hand over money to people to use a higher-cost one, are they?
And ignoring why it's used besides the sloppiness means they have a huge blind spot to what people actually want:
"wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious"
Nothing in this quote doesn't describe very real needs.
> wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.
You've sort of nailed it, but this isn't a bad thing. An alternative for these customers does not exist.
There's another vertical which is organizations that have armies of writers churning out content. Any kind of publisher or advertiser, basically. There is no better CMS for this. Large organizations like NYT, etc chose to write their own.
>> wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.
> You've sort of nailed it, but this isn't a bad thing. An alternative for these customers does not exist.
Yes! I'm locked into WordPress, which I hate, because it's the only platform that will allow a non-developer to maintain it if I get hit by a bus.
I started building sites for clients in the late '90's, and quickly made "client can edit their phone number on all pages" a key requirement. Wordpress with a WYSIWYG page builder solves that — it's not the only solution, but it works pretty close to right out of the box.
A decade ago I had to learn and run WordPress for a job. I held my nose up the stink was so bad. But quickly I learned how to manage it and have modern sensible practices around it and I've probably gotten more real value out of it than any other CMS or web framework I've touched. That includes Rails.
Thankfully I don't have to do that anymore, but you can sanely and safely run WordPress today and there's zero shame in it.
There are options that can be run by anyone, but they're often very constrained in what they can do and show.
Wordpress is solidly in that middle ground where you can do a large amount of customization if someone'll pay for it, and then they can do the day-to-day care and feeding of it.
Everything else has either been much worse in all possible ways (Joomla!) or has been a collection of developer wish-lists unusable by anyone (Drupal).
yep. we like it because with shopify or other platforms, you run into limitations. with Wordpress I can literally just whip it into whatever shape i want.
I did that once, employed someone on Fiverr to do a WordPress site. They installed a load of plugins for no reason, made a mess, then gave me my money back. I went back to a static site.
That has been my experience, low barrier to entry, low price, shoddy work. Or hire an agency, pay top dollar for little work.
Ha, yeah that's the other side of it — low barrier to entry cuts both ways. The WordPress talent pool is huge but unfiltered. Still, the fact that pool exists at all is what keeps WordPress dominant. Nobody's hiring Fiverr gigs to customize an EmDash site yet.
I'd like to move off GitHub, and I deploy some websites using GitHub Pages, so I took a look at the availability of static web hosting; GH actually does really well on this metric, although Fastly, the CDN they use, should get the credit.
Actually implementing JSON-LD, or just copying the fixed format JSON that also happens to be valid JSON-LD. If you actually implement JSON-LD, it won't work even though the RFC says you should do that.
This is also my take and I feel like we've seen this play out enough times to see where it's going. The protocol seems to allow decentralization, but that hasn't happened enough to protect against enshitification. If bsky decided to disconnect their main instance from the others, most bsky users wouldn't even notice, but third-party instances would likely implode.
The happy developer relations is to encourage people to develop on top of this "open" platform, but it's hard to imagine that's not just growth hacking.
Why not build on top of protocols that are actually open and will still have decentralized usage in a decade?
Have you seen many examples of websites labeling themselves, perhaps using rating meta tags (<meta name="rating" ...>)? Self-labeling seems valuable in some ways, but I don't think I've seen it catch on.
I think so. We've done the research on it. That doesn't mean we shouldn't revisit the salary, but I think there's a fundamental mismatch between what we're asking for and who is applying.
Would changing your usercontent.css or uBlock Origin filter to set all select appearance attributes to auto help? There are some challenges, like the custom style could hide elements, but I think that should give fall-back equivilent styling.
Notifications struck me as odd. I aggressively disable notifications in my apps because they are often just ads or engagement focused. But as a developer, it would be cool to have a way to notify an iOS user other than building a native app and paying the iOS tax. There's a bunch of utility apps not getting built because of this limitation.
According to this, notifications are possible if you add the app to the home screen, which I didn't know.
A feature more devs should use- I've been surprised how much websites behave like native apps if you just "add to homescreen" instead of downloading an official app, e.g. twitter, instagram.
When you open the shortcut, it doesn't launch as a tab in safari, but appears independently in the app switcher. They are often indistinguishable from official apps!
Seems like a great way for devs to avoid app store pains
iOS actually does support notifications in webapps, but only ones that have a homescreen icon. Furthermore, the notification support is different enough that I can't get my iPad to work with Android Messages for Web. So I have no clue if the API is neutered or if Google is being Google and insisting every browser be Chromium. Probably both.
E: Oh, I think it's an April fools joke, I'm embarrassed.
E2: Apparently not a joke.
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