Not as drastic as the headline makes it out to be, or at least so they claim.
“We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction,” the post explained. “We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside,” it noted.
We’ll see how that actually works out. Tumblr’s backend has always seemed rather… makeshift, so I’m curious to see how they manage to do that. Given Tumblr’s technical eccentricities, a backend migration could probably do a lot of good for the functionality of the site, if done properly. I have my doubts that WordPress’ engineers will be given the time and resources to do a full overhaul/refactor though, so I’m fully expecting even more janky, barely functional code stapling the two systems together.
WordPress is built on decades of hacky code, probably more so than Tumblr. I would be shocked if this is an improvement.
Not as familiar with WordPress, but if that’s the case, yeah, I don’t have high hopes for this going well…
Every comment in this thread might as well be hearsay. I wouldn’t take it too seriously. I think I’ll trust the corporation that runs wordpress.com and maintains the open source WordPress project instead to know what they’re doing with WordPress.
my thoughts exactly. Who in their sane mind sees WordPress as a solid foundation for anything?
you must be truly desperate to come to me for help.
Loki WP
Most large publishing companies, the white house and various government departments all use WordPress for their main sites. Its the third party integrations that cause security issues, not the core code.
is it decades of hacky code, or decades of battle tested code?
I haven’t touched wordpress in… many years, but I’ve seen far too many developers look at old code and call it junk… only to break things horrifically when they attempt a rewrite.
Hacky.
Wordpress has a reputation for the most moronic security issues. Especially when it’s built on PHP, which has its own reputation for moronic security issues. And that’s saying nothing about the quality of plugin developers or plugin code.
I’ve worked on Wordpress sites, plugins, and themes. That was many years ago now, but I doubt it’s changed that much. If anything, it’s mostly benefited from improvements to PHP.
Both honestly. Very spaghetti, but noone can deny that it just works from a user perspective. Would I want to maintain the code? Hell no! Do use it as an end user? Hell yeah!
Wordpress supports activitypub tho, so that could be cool if they want it to be.
I read a couple of Tumblr blogs. If I could follow them from Mastodon instead I could delete that app entirely.
Use rss feeds maybe? Adding /rss to a tumblr blog’s url (in the x.tumblr.com format) shows an rss feed
