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.
I remember using frames.
Neocities.org is a great old school site.
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 !important} 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.
Oh no, Joomla is just Wordpres with worse documentation.
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.
Isn't ghost an 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.
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...
There are dozens, depending on what exactly you want to do.
Publii is a good alternative.
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
Yeah, let it die already
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.
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
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?
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!
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