“My sense is that many enterprise WordPress administrators will think twice about continuing to use the software under these circumstances,” said IDC Research Manager Michele Rosen. “It’s such a shame to watch a leader in the open source community repeatedly sabotage his own project.”
“At this point, I have real concerns about the impact of Matt Mullenweg’s words and actions on the overall image of open source software,” she added. “Even if he feels that WP Engine’s actions are unethical and the court is wrong, his actions are clearly having an impact on the WordPress ecosystem, including his own business. It seems self-destructive.”
I always find it funny how WordPress somehow believes they aren’t just lucky that their EXTREMELY shitty software was useful at the time. It shows how power makes people think they have value.
I have tried it out like once every decade and it’s always the same hot mess and I end up making my own homegrown html mess.
Is there no other FOSS alternative?
WordPress started out as a terrible hack PHP app and somehow while PHP the language has been improving to allow people to build sane apps, WordPress has somehow gone the other direction to make themselves EVEN MORE INSANE.
It used to be you could make a custom styled theme by taking the default theme and editing the HTML/CSS to customize the pages.
The current default themes use the most insane methods known to webdev. They replaced CSS with JSON files. And then use CSS embedded in JSON embedded in HTML comments inside of PHP files. It’s completely incomprehensible.
I remember trying to edit the default theme once and simply couldn’t work out why everything had a 5px margin around it. Even setting
* {margin: 0 }didn’t fix itIn the end it turned out to be an inline style, injected into the page by JS, after the rest of the page had loaded. It was apparently a fix for an IE6 bug, in 2019, why?
The best is trying to change the styling of page-builder plugins that shove their css god-knows-where in the Frankenstein’s monster that is the WordPress database schema.
I’m so glad that I’m a million miles from WordPress now. I’m convinced it’s propped up entirely by contractors and ad agencies with minimal to no understanding of how to actually build software and just build on a mountain of hacks to do anything at all.
Oh no, Joomla is just Wordpres with worse documentation.
The fully-fledged WP alternative should be called WordPrint
Isn’t ghost an alternative?
Every once in a while I go looking for FOSS alternates to WordPress . . .can’t find one. Ghost is the closest I got and it’s nowhere near the same.
I build Craft CMS sites at work. It’s a paid product, but has a free version with some minor limitations and is open source. It’s fantastic.
There are dozens, depending on what exactly you want to do.
I’ve been looking into Payload CMS. It’s FOSS for the non Enterprise features I believe.
Interesting but man, their website ( https://payloadcms.com/ ) is a resource hog, it crawls 😐 not a good showcase…
Publii is a good alternative.
Honestly, Docusaurus. The idea of a site for editing the site is so overkill. Docusaurus is great, just write some Markdown, convert to standard HTML. It’s what I use for: https://nowsci.com/.
That sounds like in-site editing with extra steps
How?
I actually use a system like that, mdbook?
You write in ml (open, modify, save), and then you have to “compile it” to static html that you then have to upload to your site.
Online editing: open site, hit some [EDIT] button, modify, hit [SAVE].
SO quite much more user friendly, lots of less steps.
Wordpress is overpowered for most blogs, it is underpowered for most web apps.
Which is why I’m a Drupal fan. It’s wayyyy too overpowered for every purpose equally. …If I need a personal blog, there’s always Jekyll.
Jekyll is so good
The internet is fragmenting and healing. It was never supposed to be so centralized.
it’s still frustrating how much is being lost though from our collective knowledge, especially with the dismantling of the internet archive. web 2.0 was definitively a mistake, and it’s one that almost everyone fell for
The old internet was the peak.
Mostly static Web pages and thousands of BBS forums was the greatest.
My internet connection is over 100x faster than 20yrs ago, but pages still load slower…
I blame the streaming boom and then password sharing crackdowns.
I remember doing everything with frames so I wouldn’t have to copy the header and menu onto every page.
Why was Web 2.0 a mistake and what does that have to do with centralization?
web 2.0 was the generation of web technologies defined by a lower barrier to entry for web posting thanks to centralized platforms provided by for profit corporations. think facebook, reddit, twitter, youtube
Lowering the barrier to entry was not the problem.
right. it was the corporate centralization and profit motives. that was the main focus of my ire. but how the corpos captured the net was by investing in lowering the bar of interactive participation. it’s great that more people got to participate, it’s not great that it came at the cost of participation benefitting corporations, not participants
Just a friendly reminder to anyone looking for free website hosting that dozens of Public Access Unix Systems exist and would love to have you as new members.
Almost all of them offer free membership that comes with web hosting, email, and other useful services. Some like SDF and midnight pub come with web browser interfaces allowing easy access to non-geeky users. Some pubnixes do have a small barrier to entry in which you may need to learn how to navigate a conputer through command line terminal.
https://tildeverse.org/members/
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/cdg.thegonz.net/infrastructure/hosting/ (this last one is a really large repository for all known pubnixes that also allow for gemini capsule hosting, most of them also have regular https/webpage hosting options as well.
We also have a Lemmy instance!
I’ve looked at SDF before, and one thing has never changed: I have no idea what I’m looking at or how it works, and the more I look the more esoteric it seems.
Edit: Ah, that’s right, I dropped looking at SDF before because of how condescending their FAQs are.
Ooo I’m gonna use that to make a bio page. I was really considering spending $40+ a yr on a website host
Yeah you don’t need to spend $40 a year just for a bio page anyway, that’s nearly as much as the lowest end shared tier of a Hetzner VPS, which should be enough to host your website and instances of some of your favourite self-hostable services.
For a simple static website, there are several free options, most of them being free tiers of paid services. Some even let you set up automation pipelines to rebuild the site when the source gets changed (if you set up something like a git repo with markdown files, to be ingested by a static site generator that turns your markdown into a website, for an example).
On the topic of this post in general, not your issue in particular: The average blog never needed to be dynamic anyway. Static site is always going to load faster than a bunch of PHP being run in the server and there’s soooo much less attack surface!
wtf 40 dollars a month is too much
I spend less than 12 dollars a month domain included
“$40 yr” was short for ‘$40 a year’
which is still too much considering how I literally just want a bio because the charicter limit is annoyingGitHub Pages is a very common free solution for personal bio sites
To hell with supporting Microsoft services
Interesting, I hadn’t heard about this before. Thanks for sharing.
It’s like I heard the voices of thousands of cheap businesses owners who refuse to pay for a website domain cry out … …and then were silenced
This could also spark the creation of an alternative hub to wordpress.org, one that would be truly operated in the interest of the [open source] community.
I really hope so.
The current one bans most plugin forks, it’s a bit of farce to prop up freemium plugins.
Composer + other hosting is a much better spot in my opinion.
It would be nice to have the ability to host a third-party repository. We do it for Linux, F-Droid, etc why not Wordpress?
Is this Aspirepress?
Wow this might be an end of an era. Crazy. The wp community has been around for a large part of my stay on the Internet. Wild.
Matt never ceases to amaze with his smoothbrain decisions.
The amount of effort this moron puts into his weird personal vendetta against WP engine, even after the court told him that he has nothing, which was actually his last chance to end this kinda gracefully, could’ve been used for so much better things.
And he’s not only successfully kicking himself in the balls, he’s willing to throw so many years of community and project time and effort under the bus for it.
Go on Matt, keep telling how much you’re only doing this for WordPress.
Very misleading article. They’re not shutting down wordpress.org, just the registration of new accounts, plugin, etc
They specifically talk about this in the article. How is that misleading?
They eventually say that, yeah. But only after first saying a bunch of other misleading stuff.
How long until some organization forks the project and everybody switches to it?
With all the plugins etc. it might take a while, but once a critical mass is reached it would put an end to this idiocy.
Like ClassicPress, that is supported by most big plugins?
What do you mean?
Wordpress is Open Source. Assuming the license is kept in tact and not violated, anyone can fork the code repository and release it to the public.
Mullenweg shat the bed again?
The American Dream - a tax-optimized portfolio of high-yield stocks, bonds and mutual funds.
Well, I fully expect him to step on his dick, but I did not expect him to also kick himself in the balls while doing so.
Congrats Matt, rarely are my expectations of dumb behavior exceeded so spectacularly!
Things like WP prove yet another time, that investing into a proper product is better, than cutting corners. If you need a website, hire an engineer. It will be yours, and you can do whatever you want with it. There are plenty of CMS options too.
I was there when “The Web” became available to the drooling masses. Nothing brought me more work in digital media than “easy tools” that blow up if one screw isn’t turned just right.
I run WP on a dreamhost account. I do it costing zero dollars and am an amateur (haven’t really coded in 20+ years). I do it for my kid’s parent teacher org. There is some value in DIY/cheap.
Summary: he can’t take his ball but he’s going home.
Prediction: WP Engine will open hosting of plugin source projects.
And discuss.
