“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.”
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.
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
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 it
In 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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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 annoying
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.
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.
