[Wolves] Wordpress VS the World (Was: Pete's response to Linux Format)

[Zeth Green]

I think where Wordpress wins is that you can stick it on a low-end
shared host and have a blog online in five minutes with no technical
knowledge. Where it loses is that it is a huge and complex codebase
for something that should be very simple.

Other codebases may be slightly harder to initially setup, but I was
thinking two hours for Adam, not a teeny bopper with a freehost. It is
a Microsoft Word vs Vim question. Windows vs Linux. Initial pain vs
long term efficiency.

I use Pyblosxom here because I like Python web software at the moment,
but some of the points will apply to any small and light blog system.
So fair enough use Wordpress, as I said before there is nothing wrong
with it (except for unwittingly turning Adam into a drug dealer).

On 12/12/2007, Stuart Langridge <sil at kryogenix.org> wrote:
> Pyblosxom isn't good if you've got a lot of posts, though.

Are you sure?

I have 659 posts and 1470 comments and it runs quite snappy, snappier
than my wordpress ever did. I manage up to about 1500 visits per day
(admittedly most of those are probably lost) with no problem.

I think the problem is more about deployment. If you run pyblosxom as
basic cgi, then you are right, it is very slow, but that is because
every hit is a separate Python process and it is re-reading the disk
each time. The key is to run it as a persistent process.

I run my blog in Paste, however even more performant would be to use
fastcgi, fcgid or mod_python. For me, the bottleneck is bandwidth, but
the last time I got on Slashdot my web host helped a lot to make that
machine have a bit more love.

There are some differences in working with a flat-files, but Pyblosxom
abstracts that away. There are somethings that would never work with a
flat-file database, but a blog is hardly rocket-science.

> are fewer people working on that sort of thing. Pyblosxom is a case in
> point here; it didn't have brilliant Unicode support,

You are 100% correct on that one. Pyblosxom runs on Python and depends
it in for almost everything, so it is dependent on the Python
interpreter on your server being a recent enough version and Python's
track record with Unicode has not been great compared to some other
languages (Python 3 will be sort it all out apparently, as well as
feed the poor and heal the sick and so on) .

Again, so PHP is the way to go on low end shared hosts where you can't
control the dependencies.

> There are a load of problems that a weblogging engine needs to solve that I personally don't want to have to fix myself

Well my setup relies on basic yet mature Unix/Linux stuff for most of
it, so I don't have to fix that.

> upgrading from one version to the next without dumping and reloading the database,

Well I don't have a database in my setup, there are just some
directories with files in.

> caching heavily-hit posts,

All my posts are cached until something happens.

> spam-trapping,

This is where Wordpress does worst among the blog software in my
opinion, see last email.

> simple re-theming.

This is where Wordpress is worst also. To make a theme in Wordpress
you have to create like 10 files with strange control codes and PHP
commands. With Pyblosxom and a lot of others, you just grab an HTML
template from the web, rip it in half, call one part header and one
part footer.

> course, all these things might not be important to you, or they might be
> fixed in your engine, and that's fine -- I trust the WP team to stay on
> top of this sort of thing so I don't have to,

Well I suppose it is about how much effort you want to put in and how
much you trust upstream. I don't trust WP or any other web
applications really, so a nice light codebase that even I can
understand is what I like for websites.

> which isn't necessarily the case for smaller teams.

Bear in mind we are talking about a blog here, not a spaceship, not an
operating system. For something else, I followed a tutorial to make a
basic blog in Django and it took about 20 lines.

Going off the subject a bit. This is the same kind of scale argument
that Microsoft use, you should use Windows because there are X million
people who can support you. However, you only need to find the answer
once.

This is where I really like the informality of the open source
community. When I first started using Pyblosxom, I had a little
trouble with one part of the code. I found the author on IRC and he
patiently went through it line by line, I'm sure Wordpress is the
same. If I had a problem with Microsoft Silverlight, will the author
really explain it to some newbie over IRC?

Best Wishes,
Zeth