So the guy running WordPress.com (business model: Uber for LAMP stack, not to be confused with WordPress.org, winner of Drupal’s Drag Race) is angry that WP Engine (business model: Lyft for LAMP stack, not to be confused with MediaWiki, the engine of WP) offers hosting for the same GPL licensed CMS as they do, am I understanding this correctly?
Also, I just now realized that Automattic (business model: Uber for not posting female-presenting nipples) is a pun on this guy’s name.
and perhaps a little bow to lem’s “cyberiad” (automateusz, translated as automatthew, from the story automatthew’s friend)
my brain keeps telling me his social media username photomatt must be a pun for matte photo paper or matting your photos for an exhibit, but something tells me Matt thinks matting your own photos is for poor people (because it’s a lot of frustrating labor) and I doubt anyone’s demanding prints of his “rich boy with an expensive Nikon” photos
probably just a pun on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotomat
I recognize this style. Shame they stopped posting their weekly hackernews sneer.
I really don’t like what Matt is doing. Many developers are considering leaving the community.
yep. Even if WP Engine disintegrated into dust tomorrow, Mullenweg would still be the guy that fucked with the open source alleged charity that everyone relied on for a business grudge. Undoing that requires getting rid of the dependency on wordpress.org or getting rid of Matt.
As someone who is running a simple WordPress portfolio / brochure style site, what are some alternatives?
there’s a ton of 'em
the sticking point will be a plugin or theme you depend on
third-party WP dev is extremely widely available, but not so much for other CMSes
there’s https://www.classicpress.net/ but it doesn’t have a ton of end users
Depends on what you’re doing with it. You could get away with a SSG for some use cases, but Wordpress with plugins can get pretty crazy and out of scope for simple SSGs.
Easy but intrusive option: disqus, most Hugo themes already support it and it doesn’t require a server
Hard but Foss: isso, it requires a vps as it’s in python, and literally zero Hugo themes support it so you have to edit their source to include it (not extremely hard, you just override the disqus part)
If it’s a sinple site https://gohugo.io/ might be an option.
He’s now forking the ACF plugin https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/secure-custom-fields/
here’s the statement from ACF
https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-plugin-no-longer-available-on-wordpress-org/
Guess he’s still pretty shaken by the car-covered-in-hammers incident.
Not sure where there’s a good summary of the drama, but it started (I think) back in February with some serious concerns about transphobic moderation on tumblr. Openly trans user predstrogen posted
I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere
and he took it a bit too seriously, including banning them for dubious reasons then looking them up on twitter and listing all their old alt account names to their followers, because he’s totally not a transphobic stalker y’all and this is a reasonable thing to do when you’re worth half a billion.