It's not the greatest. And running it locally is fraught, because of Security Hole of the Week.
For almost everyone running WordPress, the right answer is wordpress.com. If you really need a custom theme, you might need to host somewhere else or self-host.
(I self-host my own WP blogs, but that's because I'm a control addict.)
Sorry, I don't mean to impugn your efforts :-) WordPress is a wonderful thing and I'm a big fan. As PHP goes, WordPress is as good as it gets. But as a sysadmin, I've found it a goddamn PITA keeping up with stuff in a professional "oh no we must run everything through staging and testing" environment. So we fobbed it off to a hosting company. If we didn't require custom themes, we'd have just put the blogs on wordpress.com on a commercial basis.
I used to love WordPress. Now is too feature heavy for a blog and not flexible enough as a CMS (without a lot of customisation)..I might give Ghost a try, feels a lot like Medium. How about the SEO though?
How does Ghost generate pages for web crawlers? This has always been my hesitation about this sort of platform. Does it pre-render static pages? Or is everything rendered on the server in NodeJS?
Interesting read. Last year I wrote a simple blogging platform in PHP myself, in about a week, rather than go through the trouble of integrating Wordpress with the rest of my PHP site. I sometimes wondered how SEO-optimized the result was compared to a full-blown WP install. Feels good to see that I hit all the recommendations in this article... I guess my effort is at least about as good as Ghost then, if not WP.
Love Wordpress - the fact that it's more than just a blog is why I use it. If I were to just blog nowadays, I'd prefer a static site generator using Markdown above everything else.
Given that the author goes on to condemn Wordpress as overly feature-heavy and too complicated for most users, I don't feel like 'adorable' is the right word there.
At any rate, this platform looks awesome. Markdown editing with live-previewing? Sounds like a dream come true for anyone who just wants to write words and put them on the Internet.
I'd rather use wordpress than yet another blogging platform that gives you a narrow strip of text in the middle with 2/3 of the screen being empty space.
I think Ghost is absolutely awesome. It's slick, it has potential, there's a lot of enthusiasm for it. I have been running an instance since the first public release. There is no comparison between it and Wordpress though.
The former is a neat new product while the latter is a full-blown CMS, with every SEO optimization one can think of, plethora of plugins and themes, and vast knowledge base, even if in the form of random blog and forum posts. Ghost doesn't even support analytics and comments natively. Plugins (apps?) are a planned feature!
Not to mention that instead of copying the files over to any webhost and pointing to your MySQL, like you would with Wordpress, to use Ghost you need to install node, install Ghost's dependencies, configure and run supervisord, configure the webserver, and only then start Ghost. At which point you will be confused by its testing and production modes.
Personally, I like it that way. Run an app, point nginx to it, done. You can add caching and ssl effortlessly on top of that without interfering with the application itself. But most people don't consider server administration a viable hobby.
Thanks for such an insightful comment. Out of curiosity, in what way is WordPress optimized for SEO? Is it the URL structure? Isn't the actual content what matters the most?
I was thinking that - not even terribly cheap if you are the average blogger just being read by an handful of friends and acquaintances. That shouldn't cost $60/yr. The equivalent at Wordpress costs $0.
IMO Wordpress has grown to include something for everybody. It irks me a bit when people say it is feature heavy for simple blogging. You write a blog post and publish it to the web. Yes, you can do just that and ignore the other features.
It is easily stretchable in the future when you decide to do more with it.
He's making it sound really easy. The reason many people end up using WP for their self hosted blog is that it runs on just about every shared hosting in the world. Ghost really doesn't – because it uses Node.
Switching hosting provider (often to a more expensive one) is more trouble and sacrifice than most people like to go through. Because, for those who are really just interested in writing, the blogging software isn't very important at all. It is where you write your texts and you publish them.
Being anal about blogging software is, after all, an occupation for the tech geeks who like to obsess about details. You know those who often have 7 posts on their blog in total. Like the author of this blog post... And me.
This post was relevant to me, because I was just opening a new account on my hosting provider today, and installing WordPress of course for just the reasons laid out. I don't care about anything, other than getting my article on my site so my customers can see it....and they don't care about anything other than the fact my article needs to be there.
> it it runs on just about every shared hosting in the world.
Even more to your point, most hosts either provide WordPress installations out of the box or provide some sort of 1 click install via cPanel. For a non-technical user, that's great ease of use.
I don't like using wordpress because of PHP and security issues. It never occurred to me that I should stop using it because it is too complicated to use.
I've tried to find alternatives but I've failed. Now I am looking into hosting my blogs somewhere where hacking won't hurt my other data. The effort to maintain some other solution is too high for me.
As the author of the article I was a bit wary of the title. And in retrospect not only are you exactly right but it doesn't really reflect the tone of the article or how I actually feel. A bad choice on my part that's made me look a bit of an arse. I shall be more careful in future!
I actually have a hard time imagining why I'd use Wordpress anymore. If I want a blog, I'll probably use Ghost. If I want a CMS, I find django-CMS to be pretty awesome (I'm biased because I had to learn Django for a job, though). Wordpress seems like a PITA to work with, though to its credit it has an enormous ecosystem around it.
I didn't down-vote you but I would venture that it's this comment "Wordpress seems like a PITA to work with" Sounds like you don't have any actual experience with WordPress which means it's probably not fair for you to say it's a "pain in the ass" when you're favoring the platform you use simply because it's the one familiar to you. Also it doesn't seem as though you have exp with Ghost either. HNers are a harsh audience.
Wordpress seems _to me_ like a PITA to work with. I spent some time working on Wordpress a couple of years ago when I was doing work for a company that purchased a Wordpress-driven site. For other people it may well be a wonderful tool.
I use WordPress because it has a set of hooks/filters/APIs that make it incredibly easy to build themes and plugins.
However, I'm annoyed by the 'money is evil' socialist sentiment that pervades much of the community, and as cool as Matt might be, he's quick to demonize people/companies that differ from him philosophically.
Because of that, I would be happy to start building for Ghost too. I'm just waiting for a more robust API, or at least a bit more info on how to develop for it.
Oh, you still use [very popular tech that I no longer use, and is now somehow inferior because of new alternatives I have since found] ? That's adorable.
It just blows my mind that some folks are condescending toward running WP over running a light weight solution with a vastly inferior range of functionality. If you want to publish a series of texts with only a minimum of requirements, sure there a dozens of solutions that could do the job. Publishing snippets of text is easy, no big deal.
Serious bloggers might like to have a commenting system, a taxonomy system, a widgets system, an rss feed, a user account system, a way to serve their content in more than one way. You know, typical blog stuff.
Ghost is not an alternative to WP, nor are any of the other barebones solutions. Doesn't mean they are not awesome in their own right. It's just the comparison with WP has to stop, because it's like comparing an analogue typewriter to a word processor. Both can comfortably print words, but that's where the comparison ends. You can fetishize simple solutions without having to hate on solutions that aren't even remotely similar in design.
And there's also this weird logic behind how people should pick their blogging engine. People don't choose WordPress because they aspire to use only what is written in the most fashionable language or coded by the most popular of programming methodologies, or because of some evolved affection for minimal solutions. They pick it because it has a great community and because it is open source, it's easy to use, it's totally free, you have countless people that can help you, it does a lot of stuff and because you can easily extend it in a countless ways.
How about "Oh you think you can build a blogging platform that competes with WordPress? How adorable."
I find it funny that WordPress was criticized for being a crappy CMS and when it became a decent CMS people criticized it for being a bloated blogging platform.
I also find it humorous that seemingly every 20-something rockstar-ninja-startup founder/developer thinks they can write a "better blogging platform" yet I don't see any traction in the real world.
As an aside, about Wordpress, there are a couple of important points:
1) The famous install - it's extremely simple, anyone can do it if they have MySQL set up. Even easier if your hoster has CPanel. Ghost requires either hosting on their systems or your own server running Node. The latter is not an option for many customers, the majority of bloggers are _not_ web savvy.
2) Plugins, themes and knowledgebase, pretty damn good. However, like any app store there's a lot of rubbish and it's often hard to tell which plugin you really want. Not to mention you can make Wordpress do virtually anything you want with the right theme.
3) Security. Wordpress is a mire for this. I don't have a well known blog, but I still got hammered by script kiddies trying to upload malicious files, attempting to access restricted directories, etc.
Ultimately this is the problem, Wordpress is a fantastic platform, but it requires constant maintenance to make sure that nothing is insecure. This is not a problem if you're a full time blogger, or you're running a profitable website that needs that kind of flexibility. However, for someone who doesn't blog that often and doesn't want this overhead, Wordpress is just too much.
I now use a static generator (Octopress) because I can't be bothered with updating all the time, knowing that if I forget, my site is likely to get hacked. It was fairly easy to add support for mathtex too. This plus a hand coded static site for other content is all I need. I don't need any databases, everything is nice and low bandwidth and it's trivial to manage everything with git. Thank god for rake watch!
Before CPanel supported wordpress the installation was just as complex for WP as it is now for Ghost. You had to know how to install PHP and Apache and MySQL. All that changes over time as things get more popular.
Ghost: the super simple minimal blogging platform that requires considerable server experience to setup. Plus you get to write everything in Markdown! What's not to love?
Oh, you're still dumping your own content on someone else's server and hoping they stay in business long enough for your URLs to benefit from the longtail? That's adorable.
Wordpress and Ghost are not in the same league. If I'm going to go the trouble of npm installing all the Ghost dependencies, I'm going to use Jeykll or Octopress to statically build my pages of text with snippets. Then I reap the benefits of static pages and easily portable hosting (just dump the static files somewhere, anywhere and folks can read them).
Am I the only one find the landing page for Ghost[1] hilarious?
It shows in big fonts, and I quote "Free. Open". And it's written over a background featuring an iPad. An Ipad goddamnit!
To market free & open they employ least free and open device on the planet, created by a company with a regular habbit of abusing software-patents, with co-ownerships in several patent-troll corporations to top it off.
It may be a decent product, I don't know. But c'mon! If you're going to try to sell me free and open, how about not endorsing patent-trolls while doing so?
58 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadFor almost everyone running WordPress, the right answer is wordpress.com. If you really need a custom theme, you might need to host somewhere else or self-host.
(I self-host my own WP blogs, but that's because I'm a control addict.)
We had 4 security releases in 2013: http://wordpress.org/news/category/security/
Not quite Hole of the Week, but admittedly not the best record. When you have a codebase this big, it's not that surprising though.
The former is a neat new product while the latter is a full-blown CMS, with every SEO optimization one can think of, plethora of plugins and themes, and vast knowledge base, even if in the form of random blog and forum posts. Ghost doesn't even support analytics and comments natively. Plugins (apps?) are a planned feature!
Not to mention that instead of copying the files over to any webhost and pointing to your MySQL, like you would with Wordpress, to use Ghost you need to install node, install Ghost's dependencies, configure and run supervisord, configure the webserver, and only then start Ghost. At which point you will be confused by its testing and production modes.
Personally, I like it that way. Run an app, point nginx to it, done. You can add caching and ssl effortlessly on top of that without interfering with the application itself. But most people don't consider server administration a viable hobby.
It depresses me how much trouble I had empathizing with this.
Switching hosting provider (often to a more expensive one) is more trouble and sacrifice than most people like to go through. Because, for those who are really just interested in writing, the blogging software isn't very important at all. It is where you write your texts and you publish them.
Being anal about blogging software is, after all, an occupation for the tech geeks who like to obsess about details. You know those who often have 7 posts on their blog in total. Like the author of this blog post... And me.
Even more to your point, most hosts either provide WordPress installations out of the box or provide some sort of 1 click install via cPanel. For a non-technical user, that's great ease of use.
I've tried to find alternatives but I've failed. Now I am looking into hosting my blogs somewhere where hacking won't hurt my other data. The effort to maintain some other solution is too high for me.
Confucius say, man who writes sneery headline about "that's adorable" not best placed to criticise others for being obnoxious.
Wordpress seems _to me_ like a PITA to work with. I spent some time working on Wordpress a couple of years ago when I was doing work for a company that purchased a Wordpress-driven site. For other people it may well be a wonderful tool.
However, I'm annoyed by the 'money is evil' socialist sentiment that pervades much of the community, and as cool as Matt might be, he's quick to demonize people/companies that differ from him philosophically.
Because of that, I would be happy to start building for Ghost too. I'm just waiting for a more robust API, or at least a bit more info on how to develop for it.
Serious bloggers might like to have a commenting system, a taxonomy system, a widgets system, an rss feed, a user account system, a way to serve their content in more than one way. You know, typical blog stuff.
Ghost is not an alternative to WP, nor are any of the other barebones solutions. Doesn't mean they are not awesome in their own right. It's just the comparison with WP has to stop, because it's like comparing an analogue typewriter to a word processor. Both can comfortably print words, but that's where the comparison ends. You can fetishize simple solutions without having to hate on solutions that aren't even remotely similar in design.
And there's also this weird logic behind how people should pick their blogging engine. People don't choose WordPress because they aspire to use only what is written in the most fashionable language or coded by the most popular of programming methodologies, or because of some evolved affection for minimal solutions. They pick it because it has a great community and because it is open source, it's easy to use, it's totally free, you have countless people that can help you, it does a lot of stuff and because you can easily extend it in a countless ways.
I find it funny that WordPress was criticized for being a crappy CMS and when it became a decent CMS people criticized it for being a bloated blogging platform.
I also find it humorous that seemingly every 20-something rockstar-ninja-startup founder/developer thinks they can write a "better blogging platform" yet I don't see any traction in the real world.
Looks pretty!
As an aside, about Wordpress, there are a couple of important points:
1) The famous install - it's extremely simple, anyone can do it if they have MySQL set up. Even easier if your hoster has CPanel. Ghost requires either hosting on their systems or your own server running Node. The latter is not an option for many customers, the majority of bloggers are _not_ web savvy.
2) Plugins, themes and knowledgebase, pretty damn good. However, like any app store there's a lot of rubbish and it's often hard to tell which plugin you really want. Not to mention you can make Wordpress do virtually anything you want with the right theme.
3) Security. Wordpress is a mire for this. I don't have a well known blog, but I still got hammered by script kiddies trying to upload malicious files, attempting to access restricted directories, etc.
Ultimately this is the problem, Wordpress is a fantastic platform, but it requires constant maintenance to make sure that nothing is insecure. This is not a problem if you're a full time blogger, or you're running a profitable website that needs that kind of flexibility. However, for someone who doesn't blog that often and doesn't want this overhead, Wordpress is just too much.
I now use a static generator (Octopress) because I can't be bothered with updating all the time, knowing that if I forget, my site is likely to get hacked. It was fairly easy to add support for mathtex too. This plus a hand coded static site for other content is all I need. I don't need any databases, everything is nice and low bandwidth and it's trivial to manage everything with git. Thank god for rake watch!
Wordpress and Ghost are not in the same league. If I'm going to go the trouble of npm installing all the Ghost dependencies, I'm going to use Jeykll or Octopress to statically build my pages of text with snippets. Then I reap the benefits of static pages and easily portable hosting (just dump the static files somewhere, anywhere and folks can read them).
It shows in big fonts, and I quote "Free. Open". And it's written over a background featuring an iPad. An Ipad goddamnit!
To market free & open they employ least free and open device on the planet, created by a company with a regular habbit of abusing software-patents, with co-ownerships in several patent-troll corporations to top it off.
It may be a decent product, I don't know. But c'mon! If you're going to try to sell me free and open, how about not endorsing patent-trolls while doing so?
[1] https://ghost.org/features/