Tag Archives: WordPress

Armchair Scaling Experts

rant,

random($foo): Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition. If you’re not the largest site using a given piece of software or framework and you’re having more trouble than someone who is, you’re doing it wrong.

With WordPress specifically, there are hundreds of sites I can point to that scale just fine to meaningful traffic levels with no caching, plugins, or anything. If your server is tuned for serving static files instead of dynamic requests, then a plugin to make WP output static files is a fine band-aid, but only if you don’t have the access or expertise to properly configure things in the first place. (In which case you should consider alternative hosting, help, or a hosted service like WordPress.com.) But people like to think that (1) they’re bigger or more special than anyone else or (2) that the 5-6 layers that sit under WordPress have nothing to do with its performance.

I don’t expect everyone to know about this, it’s very much a learning-by-doing thing and everyone’s situation is different. But at least operate with the assumption that if there’s someone bigger running without troubles that they (or sufficient Googling) might be able to help you out.

See also: the shockingly ignorant comments (over 200 at this writing) on this post. There are some smart people in there, but they’re drowned out by “wind0z sux!” and “that’s what you get for using (PHP|MySQL|WP|IIS|RDBMS)…”

Here’s a WordPress blog doing just fine:

WordCamp Dallas and WordPress 2.5

Asides, ,

The talk this morning at WordCamp Dallas was quite enjoyable. The audience here is very sharp and on-point, there was a ton of participation and great questions. They also had delicious Rudy’s BBQ for lunch, which I nibbled at as much as I could. Also (roughly) concurrent with the talk we released WordPress 2.5. Funnily because I kept the edit screen for the announcement open from stage the concurrent editing protection prevented anyone else fom publishing the post! Andy told me after I was done and I pushed the button, but it’s good to know the feature works. 🙂

WordPress is Open Source

rant, ,

Six Apart has recently decided that the best way to win back customers fleeing their platforms is to target WordPress, which is a new strategy they call competing. (What have they been doing the past 7 years?) A good example is this exchange between a commenter on Valleywag and Byrne Reese, the lead developer of Movable Type:

Sundown: “@anildash: what part of WordPress is not open source?”

byrnereese: “@Sunnduwn – I think that is a question better asked of Automattic. Anil, and certainly not Six Apart, has never been briefed, nor has anyone for that matter been presented with an accounting of what is open and closed source at Automattic.”

Okay, here’s some accounting:

WordPress is 100% open source, GPL.

All plugins in the official directory are GPL or compatible, 100% open source.

bbPress is 100% GPL.

WordPress MU is 100% open source, GPL, and if you wanted you could take it and build your own hosted platform like WordPress.com, like edublogs.org has with over 100,000 blogs.

There is more GPL stuff on the way, as well. 🙂

Could you build Typepad or Vox with Movable Type? Probably not, especially since people with more than a few blogs or posts say it grinds to a halt, as Metblogs found before they switched to WordPress.

Automattic (and other people) can provide full support for GPL software, which is the single license everything we support is under. Movable Type has 8 different licenses and the “open source” one doesn’t allow any support. The community around WordPress is amazing and most people find it more than adequate for their support needs.

Movable Type, which is Six Apart’s only Open Source product line now that they’ve dumped Livejournal, doesn’t even have a public bug tracker, even though they announced it going OS over 9 months ago!

I had held off criticizing them after they went OS and before they decided to start an all-out confrontation because that’s not generally what OS projects do to each other.

For as long as I can remember the WordPress about page has linked and thanked Movable Type for ideas and inspiration.

Movable Type once led the market, it had over 90% marketshare in the self-hosted market. Now they call “pages” and “dynamic publishing”, features WordPress has had for 4+ years, innovation and you still can’t do basic things like click “next posts” at the bottom of home page.

For the record, I’m glad they’ve taken the license of MT in a positive direction that prevents them from betraying their customers like they did with MT3, but they have a long way to go before the project could be considered a community.

WordPress did 3 major releases last year, we’ll do 3 major releases this year. Along the way thousands of people will contribute, as well as every employee of Automattic. What we build will be greater than the sum of its parts because we’ve been a community and open source from the beginning, and always will be.

Crunchies Win

Asides, , , ,

The Crunchies were tonight, and we were fortunate enough to win in two categories, WordPress for Most Likely to Succeed and Toni Schneider for a well-deserved Best Startup CEO. My heart was racing a thousand beats a minute going up to the stage, which never happens anymore, but I think because there were so many people I knew, and so many startups that I liked there, that it was different. Congratulations to the entire WordPress community for this win. Just wait until they see 2.5. 🙂 Update: If you want to see the shortest company introduction ever and me dork out on stage, check out this video and seek to 33:40.

WordPress in South Africa

Asides, ,

Paul De Sousa writes in: “One of South Africa’s largest media groups, Avusa, which owns most of the countries BIGGEST newspapers is now using WordPress. Here are 2 of their MU installations: The Times is South Africa’s first interactive newspaper, it’s part of The Sunday Times which is the countries largest newspaper. Financial Mail is a largely financial newspaper also owned by Avusa. It’s expected that in the near future more rollouts for other publications, newspapers, and magazines will happen as WordPress is ingrained into our online strategy.”