for better or for worse, this is part of the culture and practice at NASA. For several decades they appear from the outside (to me) to be armies of slugs and meeting-addicts. Yet look at the original tooling? the amazing engineering -- not in macro, but in the parts -- that comes out over and over. Then you get humans in that machine who are genuinely competent, somehow. We need NASA to work, they do have a great t-shirt. Maybe "slow" is the antidote to ADHD here on the nets?
No doubt they’d have been spending an equivalent amount across AWS and cloud engineer staffing; I also doubt that they’re on VIP’s entry plans, given the compliance, support, and traffic.
wagtail.io, a Django/Python CMS, lists NASA as one of its users ... but is not mentioned in the article. The article says the migration was from Drupal to WP. Was that just fake news on wagtail.io?
> wagtail.io, a Django/Python CMS, lists NASA as one of its users
I can't speak about wagtail.io specifically, but a lot of "used by..." sections on websites are based on email signups.
For example, if I run a SaaS and someone @nasa.gov signs up to try it out, I can then list NASA as one of my users, even if they just tested it and never put it into production.
And lose respect from anyone with an inking of common sense. Nobody cares about who you’ve demoed your software to. People care about who is using it. Marketing like this and the people that choose to do it are the absolute worst.
I just checked out SpaceX for comparison. What stack are they using for their web page? I am not a webdev, so not sure where to look. I found an article where they use C/C++ for flight systems, Python, and Chromium and JS for Dragon Crew UI,not the real-time stuff.
People hate(d) PHP for the developer experience, not because it can't or shouldn't run massive websites at scale. Anyway if NASA is using WP like most people do, the vast majority of pageviews are cached, meaning WP itself is more of a page builder than a server.
As someone who ran a digital agency for a while and inherited a lot of WP sites, I will say that there are few things more miserable in the dev world than managing a WP site with lots of custom functionality. It's the worst of all worlds (PHP without structure or version control, Turing-complete plugin architecture that makes security impossible, code running anywhere can monkey-patch any other functionality in the entire site, etc.)
You can impose a structure process around wordpress - version control, more of an OO approach, etc - but you're then somewhat out of step with the rest of the wordpress ecosystem. It becomes harder to use anything from the 'regular' wordpress world, which is part of the (often a prime) reason for its continued popularity; an extremely large ecosystem.
And... the availability of "wordpress developers" hinges on people being able to do the 'fast and loose' thing as needed. I know there are WP devs/agencies that use version control for all their stuff, but it's the opposite of how most people learn and work in wordpress.
Yep, this is a big reason I pulled all my wife's old blogs out of WP and moved them into static sites. The reduced (removal of, really) threat model alone has been so worth it.
I love PHP. It's been my "get shit done" language for 20 years. It sustained many of my projects and not once became the bottleneck.
Wordpress however is still a hug pile of garbage. It might be functional and has all the features you'd ever need, but I could never trust it to run even a simple blog.
> Who could ever be productive with something like this?:
The millions of sites running on Wordpress?
Wordpress?
Facebook?
Maybe Wordpress has outgrown its php legacy, but there are many websites that are far better off writing a bunch of HTML/inline CSS/and a sprinkling of php and JS and getting it out there, as opposed to setting up massive build tool chains and writing React components.
In fact, when that was the norm, line developers were far more productive and building tons of personal and commercial webpages from scratch, building websites, web apps, etc. The developer output and productivity outside of large corporations and organizations seems far lower today than it did a decade+ ago.
Edit: I’m not a PHP developer, but I’m going over that code and it seems eminently readable. Heck, even as a non php developer I can fully understand what it’s trying to do. What exactly is the issue with the code? Is it the fact that the HTML part is written as HTML and not some made up language that tries to look like HTML but then compiles down to JS which then tries to reconstruct the HTML looking like thing back into HTML? Or the fact that i can read much of the code in that single file and don’t have to dig into a build configuration file to figure out where the corresponding JS and CSS files are located?
I’m sure there’s a lot of ways the code can be improved, but this code seems just fine?
> Wordpress however is still a hug pile of garbage. It might be functional and has all the features you'd ever need, but I could never trust it to run even a simple blog.
Same here. I was kind of shocked on HN how man advocate for it.
No idea, but after 27 years of web developments (yes I started around 1996) I would choose Wordpress every day and twice on Sundays. I have used Drupal, Joomla and Codeigniter extensively, and yet my answer today is, Wordpress.
I've never really delved into wordpress deeply; but it feels like the ecosystem is fragmented, lacks any standards and is littered with proprietary plugins that are no longer supported by the authors; and create conflicts with other plug-ins on the installation.
Because of the fractured plugins that exist for WordPress is what makes WordPress the strongest contender than any other CMS.
Even though they may be security ridden, bug ridden, exploitable leading to an increase of DDoS, Crypto mining, and malware spreading and exploitation there is no other CMS out there that has the sheer amount of plugins that WordPress has.
Wordpress as well has a large pool of developers, designers who you can hire commission for cheap to create your brand compared to any other. Better?
The biggest advantage to Wordpress, from an enterprise perspective, is the huge ecosystem.
Tons of other people use it, which means tons of other people are beta-testing it for you. The WP community runs a competent security program that issues patched regularly.
And tons of people know it inside and out. That makes it easier to hire strong staff, get competitive rates and performance from vendors, and find expert help for hosting, devops, performance tuning, security, etc.
Drupal had all this as well but, sadly, it’s all shrinking. In retrospect D7 was the high point and although they tried to “get off the island” with the massive changes in D8, all they really did was drive away a bunch of believers, while mostly failing to attract new fans.
There’s a level of information architecture complexity where Wordpress starts to suck and Drupal is great. Thanks to changes in WP and Drupal over the past decade, that level has moved way up. Wordpress can do a lot of stuff that D7 could, and D10 can do a lot of even more powerful stuff that few websites actually need.
Drupal has a huge ecosystem too, and it's truly open source and built on a solid extensible framework (Symfony). D10 is a completely different beast to D7 .. and actual uses good development practices.
Is WordPress closer technically to the bad days of D7?
The WordPress ecosystem spans the gamut from my-first-site through to massive enterprises, so you’d have to expect that many sites you see are in the long-tail. At the higher end, it’s no different to any professional software ecosystem.
There’s also varied ecosystems within WordPress, as it’s large enough to support many. For example, the DAM integration cited in the article isn’t something you’ll find on many sites, since it’s an enterprise use case; we don’t even list it on the official plugin directory at all. Plugins and libraries used on enterprise sites are basically a separate ecosystem unto themselves.
(I manage the team that maintains said DAM plugin.)
Because most people don’t know how to host and maintain web software. Hence the growth of fully hosted platforms like Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Shopify, Etsy, etc.
That’s not really relevant to how enterprises decide on web content management software, though.
Exactly. Many places I've seen pick wordpress only to realise it isn't working. they go to another agency who recommends them a new website in.. wordpress.
They often get handed a website in wordpress with a bunch of random plug-ins that break during future updates (or require ongoing license payments they didn't anticipate)
The plug-ins being a mixture of free and proprietary that can't be easily extended to add features
> The plug-ins being a mixture of free and proprietary that can't be easily extended to add features
This is not true - while there are paid (“premium”) plugins in the WordPress ecosystem, they are all open source, as they are classified as derivative works of WordPress and hence the GPL virally applies.
There are in fact some plugin resellers who sell bundles of premium plugins under the GPL - it’s frowned upon by the community, but it’s certainly legal. (At least for the copyright; trademarks are a separate story.)
Typically, with paid plugins you’re paying for access to the download system (making updates easy), and for support.
My point is that the client has been given a mixture of plug-ins, some free and some licensed. Not all are designed / architected in a manner to be modified or extended. It can be a mess.
The plugins don't always upgrade easily or work well together in the future.
Wordpress is ok for some situations, I'm not against using it. I've seen enough times where it's been used and another solution Django or Drupal may have been a smarter long term option.
Looks like they load all assets directly from the "wp-content/uploads" folder (unless they reverse proxy this path to a CDN, which is unlikely). Plus custom fonts.
I run a WP extension and haven't had things break in the three years I've maintained it. Is this really a thing? This seems like a good boring tech choice.
Hmm I have seen a lot of wordpress and especially the plugins tend to be very hit and miss when it comes to stability and updates.
It's pretty bad and it really means you have to constantly update them to be reasonably secure. There's a whole service for scanning its vulnerabilities: https://wpscan.com/
Of course every other product has vulnerabilities too but they are not that easily and heavily exploited.
Not just security exploits, also breaking updates.
And plugins are unavoidable in the WordPress ecosystem unless you really just need a simple personal blog. Together with the security need to constantly upgrade due to the many vulnerabilities makes it a big headache. You can't afford to leave some updates slide and then you have to deal with all the incompatibilities and issues of plugin updates.
Really looks like they considered alternatives.
All that said, WordPress is a fine choice for this use case. My joke is only about it taking so long to reach a foregone decision