So the guy running WordPress.com (business model: Uber for LAMP stack, not to be confused with WordPress.org, winner of Drupal's Drag Race) is angry that WP Engine (business model: Lyft for LAMP stack, not to be confused with MediaWiki, the engine of WP) offers hosting for the same GPL licensed CMS as they do, am I understanding this correctly?
TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Also, I just now realized that Automattic (business model: Uber for not posting female-presenting nipples) is a pun on this guy's name.
and perhaps a little bow to lem's “cyberiad” (automateusz, translated as automatthew, from the story automatthew's friend)
I really really doubt it. It's a pun on his name.
yeah this guy doesn't seem bright enough for that
my brain keeps telling me his social media username photomatt must be a pun for matte photo paper or matting your photos for an exhibit, but something tells me Matt thinks matting your own photos is for poor people (because it’s a lot of frustrating labor) and I doubt anyone’s demanding prints of his “rich boy with an expensive Nikon” photos
probably just a pun on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotomat
you’re right! now I’m trying to think back to which kiosk chain was active in my area growing up. I do know they’d take my dad’s awfully shot film and make even worse prints, and that feels weirdly appropriate for Matt
matt spends his money on Leica kit, so that's the one good thing i've ever heard about him
I really don't like what Matt is doing. Many developers are considering leaving the community.
Masterclass in foot shooting on display, really.
yep. Even if WP Engine disintegrated into dust tomorrow, Mullenweg would still be the guy that fucked with the open source alleged charity that everyone relied on for a business grudge. Undoing that requires getting rid of the dependency on wordpress.org or getting rid of Matt.
As someone who is running a simple WordPress portfolio / brochure style site, what are some alternatives?
there's a ton of 'em
the sticking point will be a plugin or theme you depend on
third-party WP dev is extremely widely available, but not so much for other CMSes
Some kind of a community fork might happen, but I wouldn't count on it.
Depends on what you're doing with it. You could get away with a SSG for some use cases, but Wordpress with plugins can get pretty crazy and out of scope for simple SSGs.
or if you want comments edit: self-hosted, not third-party
Easy but intrusive option: disqus, most Hugo themes already support it and it doesn't require a server
Hard but Foss: isso, it requires a vps as it's in python, and literally zero Hugo themes support it so you have to edit their source to include it (not extremely hard, you just override the disqus part)
yeah, i should specify self-hosted - if I wanted third party I could just use any old shit at all levels
Hugo
It doesn't make sense for a site that gets new content 3-4 times a year to get generated from scratch to each single visitor
He's now forking the ACF plugin https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/secure-custom-fields/
More like took control and rebranded the ACF plugin
That's ridiculous
here's the statement from ACF
https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-plugin-no-longer-available-on-wordpress-org/
this coming week I'm meeting with a client that presently has a number of fairly large wordpress sites..
I suspect there's a lot of these discussions going on in places
I read the whole thing.
Enh.
Guess he’s still pretty shaken by the car-covered-in-hammers incident.
the what now?
Not sure where there’s a good summary of the drama, but it started (I think) back in February with some serious concerns about transphobic moderation on tumblr. Openly trans user predstrogen posted
I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere
and he took it a bit too seriously, including banning them for dubious reasons then looking them up on twitter and listing all their old alt account names to their followers, because he’s totally not a transphobic stalker y’all and this is a reasonable thing to do when you’re worth half a billion.
Fields API lead stepping down
https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/10/13/fields-api-team-seeking-new-leadership/
ACF already had so many problems incorporating into Gutenberg. I can’t see SCF having any sort of future when the team maintaining it is actively developing a fundamentally different editor experience.