hilko

I would argue, as others have done, that the author is correct in his points, but a rewrite would throw away the main advantages of using Wordpress over alternatives.

There are tons of successful initiatives to create a 'better' CMS. But they suffer from a lack of ready-made modules and a lack of developers 'fluent' in these systems.

In the end, it's about the right tool for the job, and unfortunately Wordpress is often the right tool despite all its issues. If we are caught in the Wordpress ecosystem, then perhaps the best thing to do is to 1) contribute to making it (slightly) less bad, and 2) create best practices for theme and module development, improve documentation, etc.

Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me though, but I deeply respect those who do so, instead of writing their own shiny and clean solution.

As for me, I started with Wordpress, no clue what I was doing, and very basic knowledge of programming. Wordpress worked, and I made a living.

Then I 'upgraded' to Drupal, and loved its flexibility and powerful modules, worked out my own 'admin interface' and happily used this base system for many complex sites. I made a slightly better living.

Then I got into Rails development. I learned about 'environments', TDD, MVC, and so on, and soon realized that Drupal has many, many drawbacks.

(And, as an aside, to configure and maintain these Drupal sites and the interaction of its powerful modules requires a skill and mindset that is about equal to writing (basic) Rails sites or using other frameworks. Except that in Drupal, instead of version-controlled code, you have one giant database and you click click click forever instead of writing a few lines of code.)

Now, I'm doing (in the eyes of many front-enders) weird shit like learning Clojure and Node.js to see what I can do with it, playing with a bunch of different frameworks and CMS offerings, and trying out these new-fangled front-end-heavy buzzwords like Angular, Backbone and Ember.

And yet, if a client has little money, or if I need something quick, I often still opt for Wordpress. It hits the sweet spot. If a client has more money later, well, then I could look into using a framework and rolling out something myself. Drupal, despite it's deceptive initial attractiveness, is almost never a good solution.

I use Wordpress mostly for the client. In the same way that I've inherited Wordpress sites after a developer disappeared, or if a designer couldn't figure it out, I assume others might inherit my projects. If the client has little budget, I really don't want them to be forced to hire expensive Drupal developers, or 'proper' developers who can figure out 'obscure CMS <x>'.

But generally I try to stay away from those clients, if I can help it.

I always loved the strategy, and previously it didn't always bother me. When they cancelled Google/Gmail Labs, for example, I didn't like it, but I didn't care enough or rely on it enough to have a problem with it.

Perhaps they just had to learn the lesson that spaghetti that sticks is probably best left in place when it has a rabid fan-base.

Isn't that why they're consolidating and trimming the business, to be more focused on that mission statement?

In itself, Reader could fit in (as the article by one of the original developers touched on). But for various reasons they never worked this out, or didn't put enough resources on it. So now they pull the plug. A stupid decision for many reasons, but not necessarily from a purely 'strategic' point of view.

One reason I can think of that they never invested deeply in Reader could be that the subset of people using it actively (geeks, information addicts) just wasn't interesting and broad enough to them.

I found this approach interesting too: http://aakilfernandes.com/uiji.html

A reverse jQuery of sorts

I think if they were added on both Android and iOS, they would sell much better. I know many, many people that are fan enough to shell out money for these games, but not fan enough (anymore) to get a dedicated console, portable or otherwise, myself included.

Same here. I'm ok with NewsBlur because it does what I needed from google reader: lists of feeds, lists of posts, and keyboard shortcuts to navigate between both. I actually paid for NewsBlur over Feedly just for the keyboard feed navigation.

What I miss from the keyboard shortcuts is the n/p and shift-n/p where you navigate without opening an item.

I'm currently ambivalent about the commenting/social part, but I can see it work and take off.

As long as the interface does what I want, I can ignore the fact that it's rather ugly, a bit odd here and there, and doesn't properly show the 'active' item. But I really think there should be a 'minimal' theme that emulates google reader's.

And, of course, it's currently a bit show. But I can forgive the guy for that :).

Nexus 4. First purchase outside the Apple ecosystem and aside from the size, I couldn't be happier.

Mind, if I could've got an iPhone 5 cheaper without a contract I might've done that anyways (mostly for the convenience, size and a slightly better camera).

But aside from pricing, I was getting a little annoyed by the experience of having to wait a long time for a jailbreak, and now that I actually have an Android device I became aware I'm more of a tinkerer and like the freedom much more than I thought I would.

This is so true. I'm by no means a 'proficient' developer, but I moved from what is often considered the 'lowest' field of academia, psychology and communications, into what is often considered the 'lowest' field of programming: front-end web development. The jobs offered me freedom, and now I find myself doing my work (with great pleasure, I might say!) to be financially stable, but with plenty of time for other stuff.

In just the past months I dove into more 'serious' javascript development, finding myself even bored by anything that just focuses on 'common' patterns of functional programming. Now I'm wrapping my head around Clojure and copious amounts of reading up on programming history, lisp, lambda calculus, test-driven development, and whatnot, with no clear idea of how this will help me 'further my career' as a front-ender.

And yet, I find myself understanding it, gaining a deeper understanding, and honestly being surprised at all of it because surely I can't be a 'serious' programmer.

Of course it could turn out I cannot be a 'serious' programmer, but so far I've been surprised at how easy or at least possible it has been for me, a 28 year-old non-programmer with no background in IT, to 'get' whatever it is that I decide to study.

And you know what? I don't even care. I'm having more fun than ever before, and my development serves my both in supporting myself and enjoying myself. For all I know I'll never be a 'proper' programmer, but god damnit I'm having fun trying. And thank god there's plenty of work to go around for us 'front-enders'. I'd be fine just doing basic js/jQuery work. It's a win-win situation!

Exactly. I would never advise someone to use CoffeeScript without first knowing JavaScript, but I think very few people would do this anyways.

And even if they tried, aside from debugging issues, I think the article shows that it's pretty hard to work with CoffeeScript if you don't understand the underlying output code.

Would you care to elaborate, to some degree at least?

I've been haunted by moments in television as well, though.

The two final episodes of The Wire left me sleeplessly sitting in the garden, because of the events that transpired and the adrenaline involved.

The Body, one of the best Buffy episodes I can recall, left an impression on my young self that can still give me goosebumps when I think about it.

And the final episode of last season's Breaking Bad comes to mind, as well as the last episode so far.

I can't think of other occasions right away, but there are many more like it.

That said, on average books seem to have that effect more. Few things really topped how I felt after reading 'The Red Wedding' in A Song of Ice and Fire, for example. I think the main reason is that for television shows, the writers have to make many more concessions, because of producers, Nielsen ratings, and so on.

I've never tried this feature as it requires location services, but doesn't Instapaper offer exactly that? Location-based automatic downloading of new articles?

I still use it for SBSettings, which allows me to turn bluetooth, wifi, etc. on by swiping the top of the screen.

And I use it for tethering or setting up a wifi hotspot from my phone (MyWi).

Plus a bunch of other things :).

I love the directness and honesty in that statement.

I agree. I think it's more 'stupidity' than evil intent in this case.

Yes, but that market is covered by Instapaper and Pocket, among others.

Ah, great observation. That really does explain it. It's not unlike the zeal of just-reborn Christians, or even just-'deconversed' nonbelievers.

Most expats I know here have done well, sometimes 5+ years, without ever properly learning German. So language is not an issue.

That said, you do need help when dealing with the bureaucracy. It can be complicated, and they often do not speak English. But it's trivial to get this help from colleagues or expats.

90% of those I work with are German, and yet I can get by speaking only English as 1) they will switch to English, like I suspect most German developers can and would, and 2) our CTO and a few others in the office are not German either.

Agreed! I moved to Berlin almost two years ago from Amsterdam (not a bad city either!) and I'm still happy to be here. If you're a RoR developer or front-ender needing work and a push to come here, hit me up :).

> But due to the negative factors in the Ruby community I would not advise anyone to learn Ruby as their first language because of the great risk of becoming a first-language fanboy.

Perhaps that danger is very situational. In my surroundings Rails/Ruby is not the hottest thing anymore, but we work with it for generally well-considered reasons. I was introduced to Rails at this company, and never had any illusions of it being the end-all of frameworks and Ruby that of languages, as none of my 'mentor' coders at the company did either.

But in my general surroundings I can definitely imagine high rates of fanboyism.

Fascinating. May I ask where you operate?

Reason I'm asking is that my main client works with Rails, but it's a big and rather old-world company where this choice was shockingly 'modern'. There's little to none off this sentiment you describe though. Rails was a pragmatic choice, so we use it.

good point. I do run into this issue at times, just haven't had a need to start from scratch with clients in a year. I either support existing wordpress/drupal installs, or work with existing rails apps.

Heh, I actually forgot about much of that. Plus, I was under the impression you meant really simple bare-bones sites with only a bunch of pages.

I definitely see why Drupal would be beneficial in this situation though.

(P.S.: I'd love to somehow know when you've written this blog post!)

Yeah, I read about that. Could definitely influence my choice of framework/CMS down the line!

Could it be that Rails (and by extension Ruby) is the first really popular post-web-revolution language used for development since PHP, and, unburdened by lots of bad practices having evolved alongside (not necessarily because of) PHP, re-introduces a whole bunch of good practices like unit testing?

And could it be that as a result young, excited and still green developers, comparing themselves to the 'bad' previous web generation, get a bit cocky about it?

These are not rhetorical questions; I'm actually asking this. I came from humble hack-together-crazy-bad-php-apps, went through getting used to more frameworky stuff with Drupal, and then ended up at Rails with a certain comfort and a definite increase in best-practice. My first introduction to unit testing was through Hartl's tutorials, perhaps because I have no formal programming background. I could see how some people after a similar process get cocky about how great they are because they write tests.

I'm not defending cockiness or whatever characterizes the Ruby community. I'm just wondering.

Last I used it, there was still too much that the Features module didn't 'cover', making it less useful and sometimes even counter-productive for me. Has this improved greatly in the past year?

This is an honest question: if it's mostly a bunch of pages, wouldn't setting up a baseline Ruby on Rails (or similar) site, or using a Ruby on Rails CMS (Locomotive, etc.) be more cost-effective and faster? At worst, you spend a day setting up the basic system that you can then just copy for every new project.

I've long used Drupal, building sites ranging from full-blown content providers to the kinds of sites you speak of, but I still find that setting things up, even when 'copying', and clicking around the interface, and so on, take more time than just copying a base rails app and changing some lines of config and code, or branching an existing project at a point where it has most/all the features I need.

I might still use Drupal, and I've invested considerable amount of time in understanding it, so I'd really like to know the best reasons why I still would.

I've had a similar experience.

For me, the most important realization was this: the moment I reached the point where I could set up really complex sites with very little code, using carefully chosen and powerful/flexible modules, the moment I figured out how to make the whole database-as-configuration issue as painless as possible, and the moment I started automating things (drush, etc), was also the moment that I had become a developer competent enough to do all this better, cleaner and faster with frameworks that don't require me to click around and configure stuff.

Drupal is deceptive, in a way, by allowing you to go quite far without writing code or understanding underlying structure. But at a certain point, the costs outweigh the benefits.

I think a example is the Views module. If you're good enough to understand the complexity of building a view, you probably have the mindset of a programmer, and/or the capability to use some kinds of code-based queries.

Perhaps the best audience for Drupal as a tool consists of people that are frustrated by Wordpress' limitations (or that of other full-blown CMS solutions), but aren't quite ready or interested in using frameworks as a starting point.

Is it really an excuse though? Some designers can be good at both sides, sure, but my experience is that many designers simply cannot. Their mind blanks at the most basic programming concepts, and the level of abstraction needed for practical HTML and CSS is just too much. Believe me, I've tried.

This works both ways too. I've met many developers who seem absolutely incapable of producing good designs. Even if I can convince them that design is important, and teach them basic design principles, their lack of innate caring about this is a big stumbling block.

Technically, one could argue that anything that has rules applied to it is learnable, but practically that's just not true. Some people just have no sense of rhythm or tone, for example, and regardless of how much music theory you teach them, they can't produce good music.

Now, on a more psychological note. I've found that most really good designers I meet are a certain type of person, far removed from the really good programmers I meet. I can't recall the last time I met this rare person who is really good at both, although I'm sure they exist.

Using myself as an example: I'm for the most part a geek who started programming early in life, but intentionally switched to study psychology/communications and engage in more social/presentational activities, and finally move back to 'lite-programming' as a web developer. I am acutely aware of the fact that for great design I need help, and for great programming I need help too. Despite the fact that I'm an intelligent, talented individual, I simply cannot commit to one without creating a deficiency in the other. Hell, I might not even be capable enough for it. I sometimes feel I'm too messy, gung-ho, and fidgety for serious programming, but too rule-based and logical-minded for the type of creativity that leads to great designs.

I'm content with that, but I suspect most people either fit in my camp, in the camp of great designers, or the camp of great programmers. It's simply unrealistic to use those few who excel at both as a yardstick of any kind.

(apologies for this rant, it's perhaps more appropriate in the thread as a whole than as a specific reply to you...)

It'll be a while before most designers can comfortably use Chrome though...