My experiences with Automattic: Part 3

I would love to see ghost rise higher in all of this, but my experience is that it’s very, very hard to sell most clients on it. They have all heard from someone that Wordpress does everything, it’s the standard, it’ll give them more options down the line, etc.

Ghost is more than enough quite often, but I wonder if a few more key features could convince a large amount of people to convert.

Their editor is great, but making it more extendable would be a huge deal. I’ve dug into it several times now, but I don’t see a clear path to a maintainable plugin API for the editor that would allow you to add more cards at will by just throwing them into a directory for example. It’s possible, but how would you version plugins? Would the editor need to be decoupled from ghost well enough that you can install the version that supports your plugins best? How do you handle broken plugin content? What if someone stops maintaining a plugin; do all the users of it eternally stay on the last version of the editor that supports it?

If that problem was solved I think a lot more people might come over to ghost as things like recipe cards, ad server integrations, form builders, and other popular tools made it into the editor.

Yet, would that actually make ghost better? I think there’s a version of this that would be objectively better, but you’d have to be careful not to allow for all kinds of potential breakage and friction. Right now everything is fully integrated so there are no regressions caused by upgrades. It would be a shame to lose that.

I wish I had more time to work on this. It’s a really fun, properly challenging problem.

I've been advocating for the removal of the Posts feature, or a configuration flag to disable it because I currently work for a different hosting company now and I have never seen a site using the Posts feature for blogging in my support ticket queue. (Yeah, I use it, but I'm a walking-talking edge case.)

In fact, I've seen a handful of sites that have a "blog" on them, but they don't use the Posts feature for it.

WordPress is a massive monolith despite its extendibility and the thing is that Matt get veto anything (this is why his hello.php plugin is still included as a form of digital manspreading) and many of the unpopular decisions are based on the needs specific to Automattic, like how the wp_posts table was used for pretty much everything until relatively recently.

Sorry to hear that (about the mental and financial health). Hope it gets better.

Appreciate the reply! I also commented more for the general readership of HN.

Rights are kept by exercising them.

You rarely want to go to court (maybe 0.001 times per lifetime) but just indicating you know your rights goes a long way. Read your country's laws - there are probably friendly descriptions online.

Ideally work somewhere where this is not needed though.

For example if the company is hostile to basic things like if you country has sick leave and you take it and it is an issue then I would say move on quickly. Unless you are happy. Maybe they are paying a lot or you are a founder, that would be different.

So know your rights. Understand a contract is subject to wider laws and some conditions may be severed and unenforcable.

Really. If I had to choose learn Rust or learn some law. Learn some law.

IANAL, but a citizen, which is the point!

Jetpack the plugin does not send end-user data home, only Jetpack the paid service does that, the customer base of Jetpack is small. If a plugin's theoretical access to user data is enough to cause GDPR responsibilities for the developer that would have broad ramifications across the world of open-source, as code written by some developer in their free time is being used by every company.

Author here. I know how the sausage is made.

The thing is that when you set up Jetpack and authenticate, you sync your self-hosted site with a clone that resides on the WordPress.com infrastructure. This is to facilitate the backend services that Jetpack provides.

This is needed for things like the Elasticsearch index and all sorts of things.

So, say you do your best to make your site compatible with your local privacy regs because you may be taking medical appointments or if you are selling adult toys on your WooCommerce site and some genius installs Jetpack, personally identifiable information makes to non-EU controlled and hosted infrastructure.

We may go as far as saying that Automattic is pushing the liability from themselves to you as a site owner. (In other words, you are responsible for your own customers' data but not them.)

There are certain requirements for GDPR compliance that I still have a hard time seeing as being fulfilled. (And I did work in GDPR compliance projects before moving over to Automattic and have discussed this with people in the data privacy and security scene that have raised their eyebrows over the whole thing.)

It is very strange to go from being proud of working on this and then not being able to recommend using it for much other than the CDN that doesn't require the sync process.

I would not claim which project has the best trademark policy to emulate. My comment is mostly to illustrate how a software license is handled separated from trademark agreements and that practically every major free software project and non-profit foundation has a trademark policy. The FSF/OSI guides are also very illustrative in how those communities view trademark law compared to copyright law.

The Mozilla trademark dispute is mostly an example of a non-profit free software community being in a trademark dispute with an other non-profit free software community, and which initial solution was simple and direct. Changing the name and icon resolved the disputed until 10 years later where Mozilla lawyers decided that the Debian version was close enough to Mozilla version that it could be argued as being identical, in which the package returned to using the trademarks owned by Mozilla. I am not sure if people really despise Mozilla for it, but I recall that people found it a major waste of time. There is just so much energy that people will spend arguing about a name and an icon.

If your intention is to highlight the changes in the policy, I would remove the word "gpl" in that above quoted text, since the trademark is not under GPL. I would also enjoy reading a take on what the policy has changed, the implication of it, and how it effects the ecosystem. Such analysis is especially interesting if you are a trademark lawyer by profession, or if a lawyer was consulted before publishing in order to keep the legal aspects as true to trademark law as possible.

Companies and organizations do update their trademark policies, so I am not sure how set in stone a policy is in term of case law. If you have such long history of case law, I would enjoy reading it. Software do change licenses from time to time (VLC comes in mind, but there are plenty of other examples, including projects going from a permissive BSD license to something like AGPL). Old version of the software are under the old license, but all new version of the software will be covered under the new license. Trademark as a concept is quite different here since it always refer to the current product or company.

His management style (which I'd go as far as calling it a belief system) simply does not scale, just like the BDFL model. It must have been great to work there when the staff count was around 30 or so, but not at a figure headcount.

I am worried that he feels like he's losing the grip he has on his holy trinity of corporate entities and that he'd rather burn it down as he steps down than letting an actual open-membership non-profit or a consortium take it away from him.

Matt didn't "make" WordPress. He started the project, which was based on another piece of software, with his friend Mike and now thousands of people have contributed to it in one way or another.

I actually doubt there's much left of Matt's own code besides some of the crap that should be removed, such as hello.php.

Then there's Audrey Capital LLC, WordPress Community Services (which is a B corp owned by the foundation), an array of Automattic subsidiaries around the world.

They built the one ring to rule them all.

Yeah. The Irish one is called Aut O'Mattic from the top of my head. Very Professional.

>No GUI-based CMS not built on PHP can be as flexibly hosted as one that is. PHP is easy and can be secured. And there are no PHP-based competitors for WordPress that are as easy to use.

There have been many attempts in the past. Some offered better performance, security, were easier to use, more lightweight, etc. However they all lacked the ecosystem that WordPress provides. They just didn't have the plugins and themes, the webhosters which optimize for WordPress, the developers and companies which are dedicated to developing for, maintaining and optimizing WordPress sites.

I can't think of another CMS that lets you easily make over $1000 for a day or two worth of work, often times without actually writing any PHP or doing some minimal overrides with filters and actions. Everything is pretty streamlined for the most part. There's stable plugins that have been active for over 10 years that pretty much do anything you can think of. Page builders that output modern HTML and CSS. Optimized hosting ready to go. Secure backup solutions that let you restore everything easily without needing to SSH into a remote server. You're not locked into an obscure language or niche CMS that leaves the client stranded down the road, or with big bills because they needed to hire an Elixir developer for their Phoenix blog they deployed via wasm to fly.io 3 years ago.

Wordpress was quite a leader in this area, as there's a great plugin to render WP sites to static files, Simply Static.

That’s the jamstack in a nutshell. I use DecapCMS to manage some client sites using that exact strategy. It’s always nice to rollback their content issues using git, it’s saved me many hours of headaches.

The only challenge is markdown is not a great store of complex component data IMO.

The problem is that what WP can do is so, so much more than that. And this is the secret to its success since it can grow from a blog to "here's a bunch of static pages" to a full ecommerce site with CRM/ERP integrations, etc. Boutique mini CMS is a fine thing but won't be displacing WP.

> There's already Drupal, Joomla, Ghost and many more.

None of these have gained as much traction as WordPress, so much that I don’t consider them as drop-in replacements for the general public.

Astro pretty much does exactly this.