Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again

Re:Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again by splatzone on Saturday January 23, 2021 @10:23PM (#25888832)

You touch on a really good point here about the default cron setting (yes, it still uses the lazy cron on page load by default.) From a developer point of view this is questionable at best, but from a business point of view I reckon decisions like these are the core of why WordPress is popular.

You don't have to know what cron is to install a WordPress site. You don't have to know anything about git or setting up varnish. You just bung the files on your PHP server, put in your database credentials and away you go.

There is a big conflict here between what is practical for users and what is best practice for developers. WordPress has always put user experience first, to the point where it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot and get your site hacked by installing a bunch of badly made plugins. But this tradeoff in the favour of user experience had made it easy for millions of people to set up their own website, and is the reason WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again by 1over137 on Sunday January 24, 2021 @12:51AM (#25889666)

>But this tradeoff in the favour of user experience had made it easy for millions of people to set up their own website

Indeed. And so many commentators here on HN (myself included) bemoan FAANG centralization and wish for decentralization and federation and the like... well, this tradeoff is relevant in that matter.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again by thwarted on Saturday January 23, 2021 @11:43PM (#25889346)

There is a big conflict here between what is practical for users and what is best practice for developers.

What about the conflict between what is practical for users and what is best practice for users?

Security isn't just a developer's concern. Having to clean up a hacked WordPress site because of crappy defaults isn't very practical for users, either.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again by falcolas on Saturday January 23, 2021 @10:47PM (#25888994)

I realize that it's really written for end users instead of developers, but that means scares me every time I see something as high profile as the White House using it. For the exact reason as you say here: "it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot and get your site hacked".

WP is absolutely NOT secure by design; it's a hot mess that has helped normalize ignoring security in our web applications. That we encourage its use, that we haven't replaced it with something better, is a damned travesty.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again by kijin on Saturday January 23, 2021 @11:19PM (#25889204)

Hopefully the White House has access to someone who knows how to set up WordPress without shooting themselves in the foot.

The fact that WordPress.com doens't get hacked all the time means that there are definitely people who know how to do it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again by trog on Sunday January 24, 2021 @01:59AM (#25889945)

> The fact that WordPress.com doens't get hacked all the time means that there are definitely people who know how to do it.

Regular reminder that wordpress.com is a different software product to wordpress.org :)

wordpress.com runs their (relatively) newer JavaScript-based stack; wordpress.org (which is what we're talking about here, unless I misread the article referenced here completely) is the LAMP stack version.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again by nsomaru on Sunday January 24, 2021 @02:42AM (#25890175)

Unless the new Wordpress is written in node, comparing the new “JavaScript” stack with the old “LAMP” stack makes no sense to me. Those technologies do not serve the same purpose.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again by trog on Sunday January 24, 2021 @03:15AM (#25890317)

> Unless the new Wordpress is written in node, comparing the new “JavaScript” stack with the old “LAMP” stack makes no sense to me. Those technologies do not serve the same purpose.

It's written in JavaScript; it runs on node.js - at least the front-end part of it (https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso). I don't know what is running on the backend but I don't think it's LAMP?

The point I was making though is that "WordPress" can mean two different things - wordpress.org (the self-hosted LAMP version) or wordpress.com, which is a SaaS offering (so the language is more or less irrelevant unless you're really interested in running your own admin frontend, I guess).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again by photomatt on Monday January 25, 2021 @12:01AM (#25899425)

We run WordPress multi-site on WP.com to power several hundred million user accounts. So whenever you visit a domain hosted by us, you're hitting 99% core WordPress, plus some custom plugins and code we run to make it multi-datacenter and super-secure.

Calypso is our JS dashboard that lets you manage all your sites in one place, plus get cool WP.com features like stats and notifications. It's just a REST API client, just like the iOS and Android apps.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again by earthboundkid on Saturday January 23, 2021 @11:35PM (#25889292)

Yes, but there are also a lot of people who don’t. I still use an RSS reader and basically every six months, a blog that I followed 5 years back and went dark will get taken over by spammers because no one was paying attention to it anymore.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again by hluska on Sunday January 24, 2021 @12:02AM (#25889438)

I can’t imagine what this has to do with the White House’s website.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Whitehouse.gov Chooses WordPress, Again by earthboundkid on Sunday January 24, 2021 @02:54PM (#25895226)

We’re using the White House as an excuse to talk about Wordpress.

[ Parent | on HN ]