SCMP's online presence in mainland China completely wiped out - <AUTHOR> http://shanghaiist.com/2016/03/09/south-china-morning-post.php <comment><USER2> The South China Morning Post has had the best English-language reporting on China for years. Both inside and outside China, that was what one read to get some idea of what was really going on. For comparison, read Xinhua.[1] Today's top story: "President Xi calls for structural reform, agricultural modernization". Story #2: "Premier Li urges Guangdong to pioneer reform". Story #3: "Top legislator delivers report on work of NPC Standing Committee". You get the idea. China Daily [2] on China is a bit better. But not much. "China to boost consumer goods quality: minister". "Top legislator lauds enhanced legislation on China's national security". There's also the People's Daily [3], which is the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China. This is literally the party line. Good coverage of the 13th Five-Year Plan and the 2016 National Party Congress.

This is a big loss for China. The USSR suffered from having all the press toe the party line. Even the people running the country didn't have a good overview of what was going on. The downfall of the USSR was a surprise to the leadership of the USSR.

[1] [http://www.news.cn/english/](http://www.news.cn/english/) [2] [http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/](http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/) [3] [http://en.people.cn/](http://en.people.cn/)

<comment><USER3> SCMP was already going down the tubes in regards to journalistic integrity. I stopped reading more than a year ago due to the propaganda pieces they were shipping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if China can fully enter the first world while still executing such a thorough and complete control over the media? Would anyone like to weigh in on if free speech is essential to what you'd consider a first world country, or is it simply one of those luxuries that only some need?

<comment><USER5> What do you mean by "first world country?" The terms first/second/third world were originally names used to distinguish countries aligned either with the capitalist west, communist east, or neither (which typically were less developed). Now it's used more as a synonym for "developed country," which is a category that certainly included the Soviet Union (there wasn't a lot of free speech there, to say the least).

I don't think the Chinese government cares about western political values, and it'll probably be satisfied with whatever economic development it can get without them.

<comment><USER4> I was referring to development, I actually had no idea those terms were originally political. Today I Learned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Note to moderators - please expand SCMP to South China Morning Post, it's not clear they have shutdown a newspaper's online presence.

Note to Chinese Administration - oh come on guys.

<comment><USER7> Yes. I briefly confused SCMP with SCTP and thought to myself, "I didn't realize anyone used SCTP. What's the significance?"

<comment><USER8> I read it quickly and said, "Why on Earth did the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have a presence in mainland China anyway?"

Then I remembered, oh yeah, SCMP was that website I read several times a day, for a couple of weeks straight, when the Snowden story broke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Who in their right minds would want China to be the global hegemony when they censor free speech, treat people like they are disposable (Falun Gong body organ harvesting by President Zemin), impose Han Chinese ethnocentric ideologies as superior to the world as did Nazi Germany believed their blood made them pure?

What country in their right mind that enjoys the security and economic prosperity and trade with other democracies, uproot all of these perks in favor of China?

Who thinks like this besides delusional Chinese ultra nationalists and apologists?

United States is not perfect or all good either but fuck me if I'm going to let China become the world hegemony and bully every country like they do in the South China sea?

The world needs United States more than it needs the world.

edit: for those saying falun gong organ harvesting is a conspiracy.

Please refer to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China)

        Falun Gong is a Chinese qigong discipline involving
        meditation and a moral philosophy rooted in Buddhist
        tradition. The practice rose to popularity in the 1990s
        in China, and by 1998, Chinese government sources
        estimated that as many as 70 million people had taken up
        the practice.[23][24] Perceiving that Falun Gong was a
        potential threat to the Party's authority and ideology,
        Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin initiated a
        nationwide campaign to eradicate the group in July 1999.
        [25]

<comment><USER10> > Who in their right minds would want China to be the global hegemony when > they censor free speech, treat people like they are disposable (Falun Gong > body organ harvesting by President Zemin), impose Han Chinese ethnocentric > ideologies as superior to the world as did Nazi Germany believed their blood > made them pure?

I can't believe people actually think this way... organ harvesting by the president?? Han Chinese ethnocentric ideologies??

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure that simply expressing astonishment will change anyone's mind. Are these well-known ideas or something completely new? Can you refute them directly or explain where they come from to someone not familiar with Chinese history and current conspiracy theories?

<comment><USER10> One does not need familiarity with Chinese history or conspiracy theories to put those claims into the nonsense bin.

But in case it's not as obvious as I see it, here are my assumptions:

\- president of China is a public figure

\- he is probably not crazy

\- most Chinese people are not crazy

\- not-crazy people think organ harvesting is really bad

Based on those assumptions (feel free to prove me wrong), he is unlikely to have ordered organ harvesting, and even if he did, it's unlikely he can cover it up.

As to "Han Chinese ethnocentric ideologies", I have never heard of it. But if I were to take a guess, he might be referring to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinocentrism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinocentrism), and it has not been a thing for at least several hundred years.

<comment><USER12> Organ harvesting from prisoners is apparently legal in China (per the Wikipedia article, haven't followed through all the links yet). So apparently some not-crazy people think it's not really bad or crazy people are running the show. Let's assume not-crazy. They have a source of organs, people they intend to execute, and they apparently make use of this. There's a lack (or circa 2006 was) of a detailed registry showing the source of transplant organs. There's _some_ evidence (but not conclusive) that some of those organs were from Falun Gong members.

So China _is_ harvesting organs from prisoners. They have not maintained an accountable record of which prisoners were used that could be offered as verification. Torture and coercion of Falun Gong prisoners does happen. In an environment of poor accountability and oversight with a willingness for brutality, the potential abuse cannot be immediately discarded.

If you think I'm just bashing China, see the US and its various torture abuses over the past 15 (in particular) years. Abu Ghraib is not something that most people would have expected from the US Army, but it happened.

Bush was a public figure. Bush was probably not crazy. Most US people are not crazy. Not-crazy people think that dehumanizing and torture of prisoners is really bad. But it happened.

This is a different scale (thousands, not hundreds) and different issue (killing and harvesting, not torture) but your assumptions are insufficient to discard it out of hand. They do, however, provide a solid basis for skepticism.

But had the Chinese officials and agencies involved done their due diligence they should have had records demonstrating the source of organs. If for no other reason than the medical knowledge for recipients. A closed examination or audit of those records would have sufficed to put this case to rest (for the vast majority of people).

<comment><USER10> I think you make an excellent point, and my assumptions are probably not sufficient to lead to my conclusions.

I'd like to point out though, organ harvesting death row prisoners is on a vastly different scale of acceptance than organ harvesting less-informed cult followers who has harmed nobody except themselves. The former is unethical because it incentivizes unjust sentencing, but the wrong part is unjust sentencing, not necessarily organ harvesting(although this is controversial and can get philosophical); the later would affect many millions of people, enraging orders of magnitude more.

Bottom line, did Jiang order the crackdown of falun gong and resulting in some being tortured or even sentenced to die? Yes. Did he order organ harvesting of falun gong members? Most definitely not.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Biographer: Jobs refused early and potentially life-saving surgery - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/20/60minutes/main20123269.shtml <comment><USER2> I really dislike all these after-the-fact rationalizations and second- guessing, and wish we could simply let the man rest in peace.

That said, for those interested, an actually well reasoned and knowledgeable piece on the subject comes from Science Based Medicine: [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-death- of-s...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-death-of-steve- jobs/)

Some quotes:

 _"Did Jobs significantly decrease his chance of surviving his cancer by waiting nine months to undergo surgery? It seems like a no-brainer, but it turns out that that's actually a very tough question to answer.

... So, is it possible, even likely, that Jobs compromised his chances of survival? Yes. Is it definite that he did? No, it's not... In fact, based on statistics alone, it's unlikely that a mere nine months took Jobs "from the high end to the low end of the survival rate,"_

Now, let's hope this thread dies instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure he's resting just fine. This is a biography that is for us to contemplate and discuss. It's quoting his own words.

Edit: removed "authorized" from biography since I don't know for sure.

<comment><USER3> You could have left authorized in. Walter Isaacson was his official biographer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recall Stephen Fry's great comments on Steve Job's "Apple stands at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts." statement.

But it has always bothered me that the age of reason also means the age when the scientific principle and liberal arts not only split but often end up with an "us vs. them" relationship.

This may be one of the least coherent and strangest things I've ever tried to express on the Internet. But I suspect that if we as a civilization were not capable of making a distinction between the hard sciences and the liberal arts, then Steve Jobs would have sought early medical treatment and would be alive today and for many years more.

Allow me to try and explain. The leading smart people used to be expected to know both the "science" of the day and the arts.

But then we get the age of reason and people start to specialize in one or the other, but rarely both. And we do end up with two separate and often defined against each other areas of knowledge.

Does this make sense? Just google image search for Millau Viaduct and tell me that product of engineering isn't also art.

I think the world has lost something by this split. I think engineering and science have lost a bit to. But I also suspect the liberal arts have lost a lot by not requiring a thorough knowledge of the hard science as a foundation.

Hell, I wish doctors were required to learn and know A LOT more math and statistics.

Somewhat ironically math is still considered an art at our universities.

But by not requiring a deep, and I mean deep knowledge of hard science for any liberal arts degree, our great institutions have created an artificial separation between learned people.

And there's also this distinct sense of mystique, an accidentally created legend about non-science "knowledge". This sense that the demon haunted world contains nuggets of powerful knowledge which would be evaporated if the light of the candle that is science would shine on them.

This mythical belief plagues society in surprising ways.

I think Steve Jobs decision to first try "alternative medicine" is party because of this.

And while every typical western (North America and Europe) university has "core" requirements, I think that's a joke. I think if instead everyone had to learn an almost equal share of hard science and liberal arts for any degree, then we'd have a better civilization.

<comment><USER5> Jobs may not have acted irrationally. Have you looked into the procedure that he needed? It is not a tonsilectomy. Here is the latest I found about the surgery:

"Over the last 15 years major pancreatic centers in the United States have developed excellent results for the Whipple surgery. In almost all the major centers the death rate from this surgery is now less than 5%."

That is a 1 in 20 chance of dying on the operating table - makes base jumping seem safe.

<comment><USER6> Which is still a much better chance than trying to defeat the cancer with alternative medicine...

<comment><USER7> It depends. If you look at the peer-reviewed research, you'll see that pharmaceuticals and surgery are not the only option (depending on the disease, of course).

I started <http://www.reddit.com/r/altmed/> (non-pharmaceutical medicine based on peer-reviewed research) because in the cancer lab I work in we review this stuff all the time but it doesn't seem to have sunk in to the mainstream yet. Based on my understanding of the research, there are some things everybody with cancer should be doing which research suggests may raise survival rates (eg. proper vitamin D levels, high magnesium intake, lots of antioxidants, etc).

<comment><USER8> "Non-pharmaceuticals" and "alternative medicine" are distinct but overlapping sets. In any case, to quote Tim Minchin: "Do you know what they call 'alternative medicine' that's been proven to work? Medicine."

And peer-reviewed research is great and all, but it's unrealistic to expect things to sink into the mainstream when research can only currently suggest rather than actively _recommend_. Antioxidants are one of the most mainstream "cancer-protectors" in the UK, but among positive studies you will also find negative studies; particular antioxidants that are good, and some that actually lower survival rates![0] Certainly they're easy steps that people can take which are unlikely to have a negative impact, but it is not an option on the same footing as pharmaceuticals and surgery. Not even close.

[0] [http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/07/us-antioxidants- id...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/07/us-antioxidants- idUSTRE7965X6)

<comment><USER7> From what I understand, your main point is that there is no need to call it "alternative" medicine because something is either medicine or it is not.

I agree with your sentiment. The problem lies with our current crop of medical professionals. Many doctors do not continue learning after residency. They tend to get stuck in their habits and stay there. Those that do continue to learn often will not look at anything unless it is a traditional pharmaceutical drug.

To give you an example, if a woman presents with menstruation issues most doctors will prescribe a progesterone product of some sort. This will jump- start a woman's cycle. On the surface, the problem is solved.

Dig deeper, and you find studies like this one ([http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039128X99...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039128X99000124)) which present clear evidence that simply getting vitamin D levels normalized might solve the deeper problem, with essentially zero side effects, and restore the menstrual cycle.

Many doctors would never think to do this, because it simply doesn't fit into the current traditional-medicine paradigm. This paradigm is basically, "Find symptoms, diagnose, prescribe pharmaceutical drug." Even if non-pharmaceutical drugs (such as vitamin D) exist for the disease, doctors won't use them.

AFAIK, Europe and Japan are light years ahead on this front. They act more according to your philosophy, "If it's medicine, we will use it." But in the US, almost all traditional doctors fit into the pharmaceutical mold.

This, in my opinion, is what is meant by "alternative" in alternative medicine. It is an alternative to the paradigm of "pharmaceuticals only," and not what you imply, an "alternative to medicine."

The next thing you said is "but it's unrealistic to expect things to sink into the mainstream when research can only currently suggest rather than actively recommend."

All drugs (pharmaceutical or otherwise) fit into this category. The research comes out, which suggests a certain outcome. Doctors look at the research (or in many cases they read pamphlets or marketing material from pharmaceutical companies or follow recommendations from their hospital employer), and if they find the research compelling they will recommend the drug based on that. This is true of all medicine, and peer-reviewed research is the best way to get a good picture of what the science currently says. You seem to suggest that peer-reviewed research only carries a small amount of weight, and I respectfully disagree.

Finally, hand-picking antioxidants and setting it up against surgery and pharmaceuticals is a straw-man. For every disease, you will find a variety of potential treatments. You will find treatments from the world of surgery, from pharmaceutical medicine, and from non-pharmaceutical medicine. A good doctor (or a motivated and intelligent patient) has the task of sifting through the research to find out which option is best, or if a variety of options should be combined.

To use your example on cancer, popping some antioxidants isn't the alternative to pharmaceuticals and surgery. A complete solution that takes into account the whole picture is the reasonable answer.

That will probably include things like the following:

* Surgery if it is the type of cancer that can be treated with surgery

* Pharmaceutical drugs that have shown promise in treating that particular cancer

* Checking and maximizing vitamin D blood levels (helps the cells express p53, among other things, which helps cancer cells begin apoptosis aka suicide)

* Checking and maximizing intracellular magnesium levels (very important co-factor for vitamin D)

* Ensuring powerful anti-cancer antioxidants are in the diet (spirulina, chlorella, resveratrol, etc.)

Anyway, that's my 2 cents. :-) I'm pre-med, and I feel quite strongly about the subject. Sorry for the essay!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found this interesting too: _"he saw Apple staffers turn into "bizarro people" by the riches the Apple stock offering created. Isaacson says Jobs vowed never to let his wealth change him."_

I wonder what he'll consider to be _bizarro_.

<comment><USER9> I've always wondered about Steve's decision to severely limit stock distribution at Pixar when it had its IPO. What he did was apparently legal, but many staffers there felt like they were treated unfairly. A theory I've been considering is that Steve did it to avoid changing the people who made Pixar what it was[1]. I mean, Steve certainly didn't seem like he cared about having the money, except maybe to say "told you so" to all those who doubted him after his removal from Apple. Just something that seems to fit with the facts that I'm aware of.

[1] Of course, John Lasseter, for one, ended up with a load of money and nobody could argue that he changed. He just went from collecting toy train sets to having actual train sets installed in his backyard.

<comment><USER10> Didn't he do the same thing during Apple's IPO? I was under the impression that Apple employees only received stock because Woz voluntarily gave up some of his own to form an employee pool.

It's this tight-fisted aspect of Jobs that makes it difficult for me to appreciate him on a non-professional level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was extremely surprised to read that the guy in charge of a company that almost exclusively produces highly expensive 1st-world gadgetry was himself disdainful of conspicuous consumption.

<comment><USER12> Aw c'mon, Apple products don't count as "conspicuous consumption". They're fairly small and unobtrusive. Sure, they're a bit self-marketing (white earphones and big illuminated Apple logos on the back of your laptop) but that's not conspicuous consumption.

Gucci is conspicuous consumption. Bugatti is conspicuous consumption. Diamonds in your teeth is conspicuous consumption. Personal electronics are just plain ol' regular consumption.

<comment><USER13> seriously? even if those personal electronics are priced at a hefty premium over their counterparts?

<comment><USER14> We really don't know how much Apple charges for their hardware because they bundle their software with it, and they don't tell us how much the software costs either.

If we assume Windows and OS X took similar developer efforts, the smaller market for OS X means it is going to cost a lot more than Windows in order to recoup the costs of development. That is simple economics. Looking to iOS, it has a much larger market and Apple's mobile devices are quite competitive price wise, which supports the software cost factor.

You might find a higher sticker price on a Mac, but it is a pretty safe assumption that the added cost is to get you into OS X. Which just so happens to be the only reason why you would consider purchasing a Mac in the first place.

<comment><USER13> _You might find a higher sticker price on a Mac, but it is a pretty safe assumption that the added cost is to get you into OS X. Which just so happens to be the only reason why you would consider purchasing a Mac in the first place._

You might find a higher sticker price on a Gucci, but it is a pretty safe assumption that the added cost is to get you into Gucci. Which just so happens to be the only reason why you would consider purchasing a Gucci in the first place.

<comment><USER14> Hey, why even buy a luxurious PC? Just throw some parts together and install Linux. There couldn't possibly be any reason to choose a difference operating systems except status, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There was also a detailed answer related to this a few days ago on Quora: [http://www.quora.com/Steve-Jobs/Why-did-Steve-Jobs-choose- no...](http://www.quora.com/Steve-Jobs/Why-did-Steve-Jobs-choose-not-to- effectively-treat-his-cancer/answer/Ramzi-Amri)

EDIT: Please see the link to the answer comment below, which I hadn't seen until now. As always, a grain of salt and all that...

<comment><USER16> [http://www.quora.com/Steve-Jobs/Why-did-Steve-Jobs-choose- no...](http://www.quora.com/Steve-Jobs/Why-did-Steve-Jobs-choose-not-to- effectively-treat-his-cancer/answer/Ramzi-Amri/comment/567595)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Side comment: The mobile version of that link was exceptionally painful. A short article was split to 5 pages. Wow.

<comment><USER18> So click "next" 4 times. It was annoying, but not a big deal...

<comment><USER19> In actual usage, it can often end up being significantly more than 4 times, especially in mobile where you might end up going through a tunnel, or leaving cell reception entirely before you finish the article.

<comment><USER18> Oh, good point! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I thought a much detailed explanation was found in another article that was posted to HN earlier this month [1].

The article referred to a 2008 blog post about that.

\---

[1] [http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-succumbs- to...](http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-succumbs-to- alternative-medicine/) and HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3080176>

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't think his decision to refuse surgery was a 'stupid decision', he was just being human. Steve's success in tech should not make him in the eyes of people be super human. Even in tech, successful people make lot of mistakes; history just records successes.

<comment><USER12> _I don't think his decision to refuse surgery was a 'stupid decision', he was just being human._

I'm afraid I don't see the distinction between "being human" and "making stupid decisions".

<comment><USER21> In the context of Kroft asking "how such an intelligent man could make such a seemingly stupid decision", human are naturally afraid of surgery, no want want their body open unless they have no choice; Steve too.

<comment><USER22> Just because he is a human doesn't mean that it's not a stupid decision, it will always be a stupid decision nothing will change that.

<comment><USER23> That implies that living at all costs is the "smart" thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe there is more to the actual story but the article provides zero support to the headline as per the the surgery being 'life-saving'. It is even referenced as a 'stupid decision' to have put it off.

Pancreatic cancer has a dismal 5-yr survival rate - much less a 'cure' rate. This feels like a tabloid-y headline given the apparent lack of reality behind that statement.

<comment><USER25> Steve Jobs had an extremely rare form of pancreatic cancer that has a very good 5-yr survival rate if caught and treated early. The article is likely accurate.

<comment><USER24> Thanks to all for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This was also discussed in this blog post, shortly after his death:

[http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-succumbs- to...](http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-succumbs-to- alternative-medicine/)

</comment><comment><USER27> A nicely written article. However, this point:

       "In retrospect, we can now tell that Jobs clearly had
       a tumor that was unusually aggressive for an insulinoma."

... seems to undermine the author's own argument that Jobs's nine months of ineffective dieting and dithering was not necessarily a problem. Was it an aggressive tumor, or not? If so, then the early CAT scan was a lottery win, and it was incredible that Jobs failed to cash in the winning ticket. If not, then sure, maybe nine months more or less didn't matter.

As one of the commenters emphasizes, what's truly incredible is that he even considered waiting nine months before seeking state-of-the-art treatment. An intellectual environment where smart people make decisions like that is not healthy for any of us. That's the real reason why we should fight woo where we find it, as if it were a cancer in itself.

<comment><USER28> I think Steve Jobs acted _stupid_.

"The first 90 percent of the task takes 10 percent of the time. The last 10 percent takes the other 90 percent."

Do you see where I'm going ? If you believe there's some truth in this saying (quote, murphy law, whatever it is) then you should fix problems as early as possible. Granted, you don't always have time for that, and this saying applies mostly to such situations. Software projects, for example. But if you have an opportunity to fix a complicated problem/task early, don't procrastinate. There are often unexpected complications. Solve them early. If you start earlier, the chance you into the deadline is smaller.

I think it's perfectly possible that Steve Jobs acted brilliant in some situations and plain stupid in this case. There are no 100% brilliant and 100% stupid people. It's not binary, a smart person is not immune to stupid actions.

[http://www.searchlores.org/realicra/basiclawsofhumanstupidit...](http://www.searchlores.org/realicra/basiclawsofhumanstupidity.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Surely I can't be the only person that wants to just read the book without having Isaacson spill all the beans before my copy comes in the mail. With each one of these excerpts he teases I lose more and more respect for the man. He's riding this thing pretty high and it's starting to be in bad taste.

This is already one of the most anticipated biographies ever. There's not really any need to seek more attention.

<comment><USER9> It's not exactly fair to put that on the author. Authors have publishers and it's my understanding that publishers require publicity. It's in the contract. Maybe Walter could try to take a moral stand, but I'm not going to blame him for not rocking the boat here.

Anyway, I've been able to relate some of the book excerpts to friends who previously weren't planning to read the book but now plan to. And as for this 60 minutes interview, I'm truly looking forward to hearing some of the excerpts in Jobs' own words on tape, which isn't something that could be included in the book anyway.

<comment><USER29> To be fair I agree with the notion of publisher driven publicity. Perhaps he's obligated.

I suppose my real problem is that the contents of the book are being pieced out to the media _before_ it is available. From my past reading about Jobs this kind of frenzy wouldn't seem to suit his tastes, and you can be damn sure he'd be pissed about information leaking prior to release. I stand by the "bad taste" statement as there is strong evidence that the subject of Isaacson's work wouldn't appreciate what he's doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> And if Jobs cured his cancer they would be saying how much of a smart man he was to try this alternative cure.

It's easy to pretent you have 20/20 hindsight on other peoples lives.

<comment><USER31> > And if Jobs cured his cancer they would be saying how much of a smart man he > was to try this alternative cure.

Not really. "Spontaneous remission is rare but it happens, lucky man!" would be the far more likely response.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Covid at School – Active Cases at Schools in Ontario - <AUTHOR> https://covidatschool.ca/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, with schools opening back up this week in Ontario, I thought I'd put together a little website that pulls down the latest info from the Ontario Government and displays it in a more user friendly way.

Hopefully this isn't considered off topic since it's only really applicable to one province, but I'd love to hear what you think!</comment>


Retina performance issues since 10.8.2 update - <AUTHOR> https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4318203?start=0&tstart=0

<comment><AUTHOR> Performance has been divided by 5 since latest EFI update. Seems like CPU/GPU are being heavily throttled. SMC reset fixes it.</comment>


The dire state of WordPress - <AUTHOR> http://jshakespeare.com/the-dire-state-of-wordpress <comment><USER2> To paraphrase Churchill, Wordpress is the worst CMS -- except for all the others.

I'd _love_ to find an open-source CMS (preferably in Python or Ruby) with clean, secure, elegant code and a well-organized framework that comes with a friendly admin and active, responsive development community like Wordpress, but so far I've got nothing.

(If anyone has any suggestions, please do feel free to share them!)

<comment><USER3> Mezzanine is quite nice: <http://mezzanine.jupo.org/>

It's Python (a Django app). BSD license. It has many advantages over Wordpress that I won't get into here, but all this is offset by one massive disadvantage: It rests on the Django framework.

Django is a nice framework for web development but it takes at least a few months to learn for someone starting from scratch. The installation process for Mezzanine requires some Django knowledge.

Installing Wordpress on the other hand requires zero PHP knowledge. A reasonably intelligent person can teach themselves Wordpress basics in days (the basics of self-hosted Wordpress, selecting a theme, selecting key plug- ins, etc.). No PHP required.

With Wordpress, it's not too difficult to select a provider (i.e. Bluehost) and have Wordpress automatically installed within minutes using Simple Script. If Mezzanine could be automatically installed like this, I think it would quickly become a popular and much more maintainable alternative.

<comment><USER4> Mezzanine contains a fabric installation that can take a vanilla ubuntu install, and have a production server up and running with Postgres, memcached, et al, in a _single_ command:

<http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/deployment.html#fabric>

I believe this is actually _easier_ than deploying Wordpress to production.

<comment><USER3> Very cool - I didn't know about this. However, this still presupposes you have a local Python/Django/Mezzanine installation. Simple for a Django web developer, probably not too bad for a non-Django web developer - but it's a bit much to expect a non Developer to set up Python, Django, and Mezzanine on their local system.

On the other hand, I see a way to make this simple for a non developer. Set up a virtual machine with everything all set up. Then all the end user would have to do is download VMware or virtualbox. Then download the VM image with Ubuntu/Django/Mezzanine/Fabric. And then you'd be approaching the same level of simplicity of getting started with self-hosted Wordpress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I might be in the minority on HN, but I think that WordPress is doing fine just as it is. Whereas my gag reflex kicks in at the mention of a Drupal contract, WordPress is still pleasant-ish to work with. It's simple enough that I can get my own custom work done without having to spend a ton of time fighting the core system. Though, YMMV depending on the nature of the custom application, I'm sure.

<comment><USER6> I agree that WordPress is fine just as it is.

I love that everything custom must go into wp-content. I love that any custom theme functions are supposed to go in functions.php. This keeps things easy to isolate and debug. Its an extreme whose opposite is Drupal, where some obscure functionality can be popping off in one of hundreds of .module or .tpl files.

Its pretty much summed up by "my gag reflex kicks in at the mention of a Drupal contract, WordPress is still pleasant-ish to work with".

<comment><USER7> I think "more pleasant to work with than Drupal" is the new "better than a kick in the teeth."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As far as I can tell WordPress is stuck. Its success is largely down to the number of theme's and plugins it currently has. You can build pretty much any basic functionality by just installing the plugin's for it.

A rewrite would probably benefit the performance and abilities of Wordpress but it would be at the cost of ALL the themes and plugins. The platform would start again from scratch. I don't follow Wordpress too closely but I haven't heard of any one talking about - or having the energy for - such a rewrite.

Would Automattic even allow such a rewrite to go through? It would be a horrible transition for Wordpress.com.

As for alternatives... There are a number of good CMS with a well designed, easy to use admin panel. They aren't popular though, plugins are scarce and support is uncertain. This often makes Wordpress the best choice by default. Which is kinda sad.

<comment><USER9> It's massively entrenched because of the network effect of the themes and plugins, no doubt. What will overtake wordpress as a blog/cms platform is something that can allow for a large number of the popular themes and plugins to be dropped in (or converted silently). It probably won't happen, but think of Lotus/Excel, for example (or WordPerfect/Word) - both Lotus and WordPerfect were dominant for a long time. People converted when their data/functionality was easily imported in to MSOffice. It's not a perfect comparison, but I suspect this will be what is needed to get people to migrate from Wordpress.

Even that will be an uphill battle, given how many wordpress installs are one- click installs from control panels, somewhat customized to the specifics of that control panel's paths/security/etc.

<comment><USER7> But the thing is, many of the major flaws of WordPress are baked into its theme and plugin formats. Much like with Excel, you'll need to match it quirk- for-quirk to interoperate with it. And what's the point of simply reimplementing WordPress?

<comment><USER9> I think you could probably get away with shooting for something like 70-80% functionality via a wrapper layer around your new APIs. Even Excel and Word aren't 100% compatible between their own versions, and WP is going through a transition period where many older plugins don't work either.

The goal would not be to reimplement all of wordpress, but implement a compatibility layer suitable to emulating enough of the basics to allow some migrations and encourage people to try out something new.

There's dozens of CMS and blogging engines out there, but no one has attempted a WP-emulation layer (as far as I can tell). Although, given it's PHP nature, and direct grabbing of $_GET and $_POST and such, it may simply not be possible at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wordpress is making big steps in the right direction.

* Their wild pile of oddly-named functions are being deprecated and moved into well-designed classes.

* Better templating options are being promoted.

* Yes, the global $wp_query leaves some to be desired, but at its core, wpdb's WP_Query is a decently powerful database abstraction, and if used right can perform well at scale.

No, the hooks aren't going away, nor is the URL-to-template mapping. But those are the parts that make it so flexible and easy to work with. MVC is a controller dictatorship, WP's code is a democracy.

<comment><USER11> I think curation and code review should really be an important part of the theme and plugin repositories.

Perhaps they need 'approved' and 'Open' directories for the repositories?

There used to be this issue with people having issues distributing plugins; now with github, that is much much easier.

There is just so much bad code floating around, people not following best practices and loading JS libraries that core includes, conflicts with other plugins, etc. Its a mess.

<comment><USER12> Code review _is_ a part of the theme repository, if you're talking about themes hosted on WordPress.org. Themes hosted elsewhere (ThemeForest, GitHub, etc) have no such oversight.

Themes hosted on WordPress.org (the official repository) have to pass through the Theme Review Team, which does enforce certain guidelines and standards: <http://make.wordpress.org/themes/guidelines/>

There's also a large group of people moving to add similar oversight for the official plugin repository; but when you have a repository with 24,000+ separate projects, managing a code review for each one - and for changes to each one - is a huge undertaking.

<comment><USER11> I had heard there was a Code review for the theme repository, my feeling (pure speculation) is that the review process is there to weed out truly bad coding or malware but there was no strict edicts on style or 'the _right_ way to do things'.

I understand enforcing methods and whatnot is probably not in the best interest of Automattic, WordPress.org nor the community; if it is feasible at all. I'd just like to see some kind of curation based on 'the _right_ way to do things', if anything just so I know when I'm doing things the right way.

The Codex and general documentation has become a bit muddled with new APIs and conflicting philosophies between developers. What used to be WordPress' greatest asset (its documentation) is starting to falter behind a bit. It's been hard for me since ~3.2 to figure out where I should be changing my boilerplates as WP updates.

I follow TRAC, I keep as updated as I can on future changes and point releases but without solid documentation sometimes I feel like I don't know if I'm doing things the way they were intended.

Savvy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm yet to inherit a PHP project that does not contain a file called "functions.php" and it always makes my heart sink when I see it.

What I don't get is the demand for all kinds of stuff to be built on top of wordpress that doesn't really have much to do with content management or blogging. For example online games, CRM systems, auction sites etc.

Seems a bit like asking for a CMS system that has been implemented as a minecraft mod.

<comment><USER14> People treat WordPress like a Swiss Army Knife because they can. Why build an online directory or CRM or auction site from scratch when you can just use WordPress? It can be a bit sloppy, code-wise, but it works and you can get the job done a lot faster than it would take to do it from scratch.

Consider an online business directory. You could just build one from scratch or use some script designed for that purpose but WP simply offers more flexibility. If you decide you want a Google Map displayed in each listing, just download the relevant plugin. If you want to add oEmbed functionality (for, let's say, embedded videos), it's already built-in. If you want to do advance taxonomy queries use the Taxonomy Drill-Down plugin, etc.

Yes, it's all held together with chewing gum, but it works.

<comment><USER15> I suggested our company site be re-done using Joomla. The original site was on an ancient platform that we don't work with anymore and we kept an entire server around for it.

We spun up a cloud server with Joomla on it for production use, and a local VM for testing. We had a template created for a couple hundred bucks from some ideas our designers came up with (they can't code, so...) from an Eastern- European on a freelancing site.

Then we just let our marketing guy (also can't code) and some interns loose putting up content. It took a few weeks of their spare time and we had a great looking, functional website.

Since then, the marketing guy has installed a hundred different 'Joomla plugins of the week' and brought the site down a bunch of times, trying to make it into a blog, newsletter, signup sheet, web store...

<comment><USER16> Ugh I have been there with Joomla... my marketing guy thought he was creating Yahoo! for the 21st century but in reality he was breaking the site every 3 hours and then calling me for help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The main benefit to Wordpress is its built-in content editing system that's mostly accessible to end users. So you can build a site for someone and then show them how to use the nice admin interface and page editor, and let them manage the content themselves after you're gone, rather than having to be involved for every little page change afterward.

And of course as others have mentioned, the plugins are pretty great too. A client can ask you if you can do X (e.g., tie into their Twitter) and BAM, install a plugin, done, you look like a hero. Compare that to having to write/install/test something similar.

</comment><comment><USER18> The main problem perpetuating Wordpress' design woes is its plugin ecosystem and how it depends on Wordpress' internals. A massive hook system, scopeless globals passed around like nobody's business and overall reliance on how "things work" right now - if you change any of that, you break most of the plugins (the code for which looks even worse than Wordpress itself).

An idea I always have in the back of my queue is to write an adapter over the hook system and various state variables plugins expect to have, and bridge it (the plug-in system) to something like the Zend Framework or Symphony. The amount of work involved prevents it from becoming more than a pipe dream.

EDIT: Added clarification for the adapter purpose

<comment><USER19> there's already a symfony2 bundle that has started that work i think. I don't recall the name though.

<comment><USER18> You're probably talking about this - <https://github.com/kayue/WordpressBundle>

Not what I was talking about - this allows you to run wordpress on a symfony site and share user state (pretty trivial).

I'm talking about an adapter that allows you to run Wordpress plug-ins - without Wordpress. Basically allowing you to write a normal blog system while leveraging the huge community and functionality of WP plugins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article is good but misses a minor point: Wordpress was never intended to be MVC, the developers had probably never even heard of MVC when it was first developed. Wordpress is a bastard.

I've thought about how terrible actually hacking on Wordpress actually is, and truth be told, the horribleness is so entrenched that any kind of form or community effort to improve it would introduce incompatibilities with the ecology that are insurmountable. Wordpress is stuck.

<comment><USER21> > Wordpress was never intended to be MVC, the developers had probably never > even heard of MVC

Not only _the_ developers, maybe even _most_ developers outside of certain communities. I'd been exposed to the concepts, but I'd never worked on an "MVC" site until about 3-4 months after the first release of WordPress, and I'd been doing for over five years at that point.

> I've thought about how terrible actually hacking on Wordpress actually is

Hacking core is pretty bad. Heck, even _reading_ core to try and understand what's going on under the hood can be a challenge.

But writing themes and plugins is not that bad -- indeed, if it was, I suspect you would find a far smaller mass of them. It's not MVC, and particularly if you're used to that organization of a web app, it's disorienting, but the APIs are reasonably organized, well-specified, and let even n00bs get things done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Software rewrites are extremely challenging, and more often than not, fail (good example: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>). Perhaps a more measured factoring approach over time would be more appropriate?

<comment><USER12> WordPress is already going through a measured factoring approach.

Themes were ported over from a mishmash of procedural calls into the WP_Theme object in version 3.4. Posts (and pages, custom post types, etc) were ported over from an associative array and various procedural calls into the WP_Post object in 3.5.

But WordPress does - and likely always will - work to retain backwards compatibility so that existing themes and plugins won't choke after a core update. So even when newer APIs and refactored objects exist, its up to individual developers to 1) learn about them and 2) start using them.

<comment><USER22> Nice. Wordpress's value is derived from its ecosystem as opposed to its technical purity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Many of the complaints here are common to all major web CMSs, which is what drove me to write about "Decoupling Content Management" two years ago: <http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/decoupling_content_management/>

Since then, there have been common infrastructure components like Create.js, PHPCR, and Symfony2 that have been widely accepted by many of the projects. Through that, the state of Content Management is now steadily improving.

Sadly, WordPress has so far stayed outside of this development.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think the first step would be that the Wordpress core developers start to mingle with the PHP community. I simply have not met a single Wordpress core developer at any PHP conference and I tend to go to 6-10 a year in various countries around the world.

I have also not seen any Wordpress core dev participate on an php-src internals discussion let alone something like the Framework Interoperability Group that outs out the PSRs.

Note I guess it might actually be that I did come across a Wordpress core dev, but maybe they just didnt identify them as such.

But without communication the chances of collaboration are low and without collaboration imho its going to be hard for Wordpress to identify and assess the potential for new directions.

That being said, Wordpress is king of the hill and it at least right now there is no indication of this changing. So changing might just have a ton of risks with maybe little chance of success. Then again I guess AOL once thought quite similar about their position.

</comment><comment><USER25> PROTIP: If you want to get rid of wordpress, make something that will run on cheap hosting with one click installs, and be easy enough that a non-technical user can setup their own site with it.

<comment><USER26> Cheap hosting gets better and one-click installs get smarter.

Dreamhost and Webfaction have a Django one-click installer. There's no reason why other shared hosts can't do the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Until the ecosystem shows any signs of slowing down, posts harping about the codebase of WordPress will lack conviction. There is an army of developers who don't particularly like the inner workings of WordPress. But WordPress is thriving and has a booming commercial & free theme and plugin market. A glorious rewrite in whatever ideological direction you want to take it is more likely to damage its success. If a better codebase is so important, another CMS should eventually gain more ground. In which case, it's more productive to talk about why another CMS is so good, rather than lament about WP.

Having said that, the codebase is likely to become more javascript centric, which might make things even more complex. It will be interesting to see it evolve. I just don't think calling WordPress 'dire' accurate. Nor is it in need of rewrite just for the sake of writing more beautiful code. Does it have to adapt and evolve? Of course.

</comment><comment><USER28> Words are wind and WordPress is not gonna be "fixed" any more than PHP itself will.

If you want something different/better, start it yourself and evangelize it. If it really is better and you do a good job hopefully it will eventually win out.

<comment><USER7> PHP has gotten a lot better over the past few years. I would argue that PHP is making more progress than WordPress is.

<comment><USER28> That's probably fair but PHP is never gonna be totally sane. There will always be weird quirks that are just ingrained in the language. Every language, every application has weird shit because it's all made by people who are just bundles of weird shit.

The problem is when someone else's weird shit is incompatible with your weird shit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The beauty of WordPress is its ubiquity. I jump on my hosting account, click on the 1-click install and bingo. Click upgrade WP and boom - upgraded. Choose one of thousands of free themes and yipee-ki-yay!

The multitude of themes and plugins and the fact that I really have no need to get my hands sticky in PHP unless I really have some desperate need to fiddle with a pot of goo, is really what makes WordPress number one.

It might not be great under the covers, but the lipstick on this pig just seems to be enough to keep me happy!

</comment><comment><USER30> Fixing WordPress's code problems don't really need to break plugin compatibility. They can rewrite the core, have new features requiring doing things the new way, and have small adapters to maintain the backward compatibility.

But yes, this refactoring is going to cost and there is unfortunately not many people for whom it is a worthwhile expense. If Automattic is able to think about 10 years in the future, it might make sense for them to start investing in such a clean up.

<comment><USER27> It's a very tough act to balance, because too many changes will prompt criticism that all kinds of things are breaking on a new update. You can't please both ways, so things move pretty gradually.

Having said that each new version has improvements. The direction I think is more dictated towards where the web is going. Each new release increases the amount of javascript, even backbone has made its way into core. There will also soon be better support for other DBs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I agree with the conclusion that WordPress developers could use more "rules" when developing.

But there's really nothing keeping you from defining your own rules and working within the WordPress system. It's not MVC, but you can get something as good by keeping frontend-related code/templates in a theme and backend- related code/modules inside of plugins.

The problem is that 3rd party plugins you use might not use your rules. So the code you are getting for free (or cheaply) isn't coded how you would have liked. Code it from scratch or re-factor it to suit your needs. If you were using another framework, you probably would have had to code that functionality yourself anyway.

While I'm at it some more pet peeve's RE some common complaints:

* Everything is in functions.php. Cool, so setup YOUR functions.php like this: require_once("includes/config.php"); require_once("includes/settings.php"); require_once("includes/helpers.php"); require_once("classes/class.myclass.php");

Problem solved.

* The posts table doesn't support my data structure. Awesome, just add your own table and add a class wrapper to push/pull data. Add methods to search or whatever you need. Sure this may be slightly easier with other frameworks because they do a bit of that for you. But if you've done this once before, you just copy and paste the code and change the object names, etc.

Maybe I'm wasn't disciplined enough when I used PHP frameworks in the past, but with all of the structure and rules, I found myself wasting as much time working around those constraints in special situations as I was saving using their module scaffolding/etc.

</comment><comment><USER32> (Again) I agree with this article 100%. Wordpress is so messed up right now. It's codebase is clunky and it has a lot of redundant code (variables especially) out there.

I want you to:

Install Wordpress version 'X', develop themes and plugins for it and do an update after say, 6 months or after a year or so and tell me it doesn't break anything or show weird behavior. (Some versions show CPU spikes even for simple post aggregations)

Some examples of redundant code:

Try creating pagination for a page and you'll notice they use two variables $page and $paged for the same functionality and this has zero documentation, you need to spend hours and hours trying to find out if it was you or if the core of wordpress is so bad. Wordpress has become bloated because they want to maintain backwards compatibility with previous versions, which I think is a bad idea for NOW. They could easily launch a new version removing the support for old versions, just like JQuery did.

Don't get me wrong - Wordpress is the best blogging solution right now you'll ever find, that's so polished and so forth. But it's the worst CMS you can build on top off for your projects (been there!).

Right now, the best solution for me would be:

        rails generate scaffold Post name:string title:string content:text

</comment><comment><USER33> The author states the problem himself: Wordpress is a blogging platform that people are trying to turn into a full blown CMS.

Stop trying to do that. If you want a "real" CMS with serious content types and a more thought-out plugin system, go use Drupal (if you have to use PHP and not much time to code). If you have more bones for coding, start with Symfony like your colleagues, or Django, or RoR.

If you have even the faintest inkling that a site will mutate from a blog to something more serious, don't start with Wordpress. If your fundamental data types from day one until infinity are not pages or posts, do not start with Wordpress. You cannot make it into something it's not, even though it's getting so popular that enough people will be tempted to do so.

The reason Wordpress is still so popular is that blogging and basic website creation are still getting more popular, and Wordpress is still a great way to accomplish either of those things since it will be used _exactly as intended_. I don't anticipate these common needs will shift too much in the near future, and the LAMP stack is just too stable and well-supported to go anywhere, so Wordpress is gonna be around for a long time.

> _It is like trying to teach a language that doesn't have an alphabet_

Chinese doesn't have an alphabet. It's used by many people and it's possible to teach to those who use alphabetic languages.

That doesn't mean everybody should learn it, or that it's a model for how a _de novo_ language should be designed today. Use it for what it's good for: talking with Chinese people.

In general, I'd just be more careful with cultural analogies like that.

<comment><USER27> > The author states the problem himself: Wordpress is a blogging platform that > people are trying to turn into a full blown CMS.

Trying and succeeding.

Pressbooks, book publishing engine on top of WordPress (selfhosted & Saasversion)

Woocommerce ecommerce with 600k+ downloads (selfhosted & Saas version)

WP e-Commerce, 2 million+ downloads

BuddyPress, equips WP with social network features 1.4+million downloads

P2 Theme, quick community messaging almost 350k downloads

Collabpress, project and task management solution 36k downloads

bbPress, complete forum package, half a million downloads.

S2Member, Wishlist, DAP, MagicMembers, WP Member are among many other membership site solutions, >1 million downloads

Pods, Toolset and other solutions that extend its CMS capabilities, easily 200k+ downloads.

EditFlow, adds professional editorial workflow experience, 50k+ downloads

Fundify, Ignition Deck, crowdfunding solutions on WordPress.

And look in the wild, sites running WordPress: Real estate sites, agencies, hotel sites (there's a WP saas for that now too), restaurant sites (Happy tables), auction sites, market place sites, portfolio sites, photo gallery sites, governmental sites, membership sites, marketing sites equipped with landing pages etc, news sites, online magazines, Event sites and more.

Just a blogging tool, I see. Do continue to look away as it is only going to get worse (in your eyes).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Most people using WordPress are not developers. So naming conventions that might make sense to you don't apply to the average user.

It's called "wp-content" because that's where all personal, custom stuff goes --all your photos, plugins, etc. (Not including your MySQL data.) When you upgrade WordPress (which wasn't always automatic) your "content" is left untouched--because you want your own stuff apart from the rest of the application. The other directories, more or less, are owned by the core developers and Automattic.

Since 2004 when I started blogging, I've watched WordPress add so many bells and whistles. It's the opposite of what made it appealing in the first place, an elegant "poem" of an application. Now with so many developers working on it, it tries to be all things to all people.

What's interesting to me, to see websites outgrow WordPress. Sometimes your content expands such that WordPress can't deal with it. WordPress is a one- size-fits-all solution and that's ultimately limiting. At that point you can contact someone like me to create a custom application from scratch that just does what you want--not 1000 extra things you don't want, yet preserving your URLs for SEO, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here's a suggestion,

If we can't get WordPress to change, why not fork it and build a "developer" friendly version while maintaining compatibility with subsequent iterations of WordPress?

Frankly, I find the people who run the WP development community to be insufferable (Matt included). If you've ever read their discussions for code changes, it just makes you want to pull your hair out. Their pedantic in fighting rivals Wikipedia.

<comment><USER35> Maintaining complete compatibility with WordPress, including any future changes, while trying to clean up design problems (how is this actually possible without breaking anything?) would be a full-time unpaid job from hell and who would actually thank you for it?

<comment><USER36> Exactly. Everyone that says "fork it" also say "maintain plugin/theme compatibility". That compatibility is part of the problem. The best solution is something that is easy to install and administer for non-dev users. To get something with the extensibility of wordpress will probably take a very long time. For now we just have to deal with what wordpress is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> As others have mentioned, forking WordPress won't help. Writing abstraction layers might help a little (I've done that myself a few times) but instead, if you use WordPress, I'd encourage you to get involved with improving it directly. It's a slow process (especially as WordPress still supports PHP 5.2) but there is progress.

If you know PHP then there's loads of issues you could get involved with to help move it forward. Here's just 4 that could do with some attention:

* PSR-0 autoloader <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21300>

* Use a Symfony style request object instead of globals <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/22325>

* Use PDO for database access <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21663>

* PSR compatibility <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/23357>

</comment><comment><USER38> I've used Symphony CMS (getsymphony.com) to build several websites, one of them quite large. I love it. It's the first CMS I've used that isn't a total mess architecturally. At it's core it provides a highly customizable interface for maintaining a database of content, XML data sources that pull from that database (or external XML sources), and XSL templates that are combined with the XML to produce the HTML pages of the site.

It's totally open source, and development is carried out on github (which includes _all_ its extensions (<http://symphonyextensions.com/)>). The developer forums on the main website are active and many of the core developers answer questions rapidly. I can't recommend it enough.

Its downsides are 1) XSLT (some people can't stand it) 2) No polished off-the- shelf templates, you'll have to roll your own (but it's easy enough to get something up with Bootstrap and tweak it for your purposes).

<comment><USER39> I wondered if Symphony was going to show up here! I'm also a fan. I've built small websites with it for over a year.

As to XSLT: I find it close enough to HTML to feel that I'm straight up writing the front-end, but with a lot more efficiency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I could not agree with this more. As I've developed larger and larger sites the more I've become frustrated with how hacky and garbage even "solid" WP code is. For crap's sake, if you use child themes you have to make functions with no return values. You have no choice.

Is a rewrite the answer? I dunno, but I sure as heck moved the WP sites to WP Engine rather than risk our servers' health on trying to deal with security and performance.

I still think it's hard to beat when dealing with a lot of content. There's at least a hundred ways to enumerate all the ways the admin sucks, but it is pretty functional compared to say, Joomla, which we migrated from. Joomla is a black box with no particular logic where I have to reach for horrific third party bullcrap to accomplish even the most basic tasks. If you have experience with Joomla, imagine managing 5000 pages with it.

</comment><comment><USER41> Somebody writes this article every few years, and whenever it's published, a greater percentage of the Internet runs on WordPress than at the time the last article of its type was published.

WordPress is pragmatic, and that has paid off for the project. I think more projects should follow their example.

</comment><comment><USER42> Interesting article. I actually do like developing for WordPress, but agree with you on many points. I'm just in the middle of having to write extra code to create a table in the database to hold some additional meta data for a custom taxonomy (sigh). Like many developers (I suppose), I've just built a small set of tools that allow me to get round some of the major issues, and starting with a decent theme (I'm quite a fan of Roots) can allow some pretty solid web development. It's never going to be quite as good as a ground-up build, but finding the hours to push into user interface development is hard - the settings and admin screen APIs in WordPress aren't bad.

</comment><comment><USER43> Some really excellent comments in this discussion. While there is some predictable reactions (my way is right! your way is wrong!) I'm impressed by the number of people who've taken a more nuanced view of how and why platforms get adopted by developers and regular folks.

One thing I'd encourage people to think about in terms of how we take WordPress to the next level isn't just _that_ we have a ton of plugins and themes that people love, but how we got them in the first place. That network effect wasn't always there, it developed over time, and was caused by something.

</comment><comment><USER44> I do a lot of work in both Magento and WordPress and Magento has often been cited as a way of "doing it right" being built on Zend and all. If that's doing it right, I'm happy with doing it wrong.

WordPress is a great way of getting going fast. Probably a lot of guys come upon the thing just about the time a product is ready to be sunset or needs to be introduced to a team. Anything at that point is due a rewrite. I would imagine this experience alone is the cause of much consternation and whatever the product/website would have been built on would be the whipping boy.

</comment><comment><USER45> For all the people mentioning Joomla, are you talking about 1.0, 1.5, 1.6-1.7, 2.5, 3.0? The framework, the CMS, or both? These are all radically different products, which is symptomatic of the challenges that project has had. I'm curious to know who thinks it's gotten better, or worse, and why -- or if everyone's just recalling the 1.0-1.5 era when Joomla had more adoption than anything else like it.

</comment><comment><USER46> There is always Habari, the newer, modular "microkernel", modern PHP based, Apache-licensed CMS/blogging platform. Since it's PHP, it features the same easy deployability. But it has stagnated in the last years and only recently has development taken up speed again. If you're interested in hacking on something like that, drop by irc.freenode.net #habari or mail to habari- firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER47> To ease out some of the pains James writes about, I created a bare Wordpress repo that is designed to separate content, media and wordpress' own files so it works better with git, git submodules and deployment with ie. capistrano.

<https://github.com/ErikFontanel/Wordpress-Corpse>

please fork and adjust it to your own likings!

</comment><comment><USER48> To rewrite WordPress successfully (so it doesn't break everything all at once) would take a hybrid approach, making hundreds of rewrites of smaller chunks over time, maintaining compatibility while improving the code, allowing theme and plugin authors to support new implementations as they are offered, deprecating old ones over time.

Which is exactly what's already happening. ;)

</comment><comment><USER49> Rather than tackling a rewrite of Wordpress itself, what about a set of conventions and practices for add-ons and themes, a clearly defined set of API functions, and an automated validator to enforce at least some of it.

Even if the validator was just a grep for function calls outside of a whitelist, that would be an excellent starting point.

</comment><comment><USER50> No mention of modx yet?

More a framework than an CMS really, the best thing about it is you can build how you want to i.e everything is incredibly flexible. For clients you can easily create a super simple interface for editing.

<comment><USER51> There was mention of it but it's gone now for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I was wondering if I would see Umbraco (www.umbraco.com) here - I just used it for a project and walked away very impressed. And the client loved it. Version 6 is moving to MVC.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands it seems to me WP has tried to be everything to everybody and the cracks are finally starting to show.

I've never been a huge fan of WP for several reasons. One is the horror of trying to crowbar one of their themes into what I want it to look like. The second is the ungodly amount of bloat the have on their themes and templates.

Just give me something stripped down and lightweight that I can build on. Too many of these frameworks are just constantly in your way when you need to do something.

<comment><USER11> You don't have to use anyone else's themes. You can create your own; and its almost as easy as making a regular static site.

There is never a need to 'crowbar' anything when you can create the entire look and feel from scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> For the average person, Wordpress is VERY easy to install, and moderately easy to use.

For geeks and people who understand technology and programming, I suppose Wordpress wouldn't cut it.

</comment><comment><USER54> There is nothing stopping you from forking your own version of WordPress. It is GPL and as long as your derivative work is also GPL you should be fine.

</comment><comment><USER55> i've had to hack additional functionality into some third-party wordpress plugins for clients. it is a nightmare compared to my own PSR-0/Composer projects. it's just an incredibly twisted kludge of code stuffed with globals and craziness. most unpleasant experience ever.

sadly, wordpress's massive plugin ecosystem of poorly written spaghetti is the very thing that will prevent it from being rewritten.

</comment><comment><USER56>
      WordPress needs more rules

I'm convinced Wordpress is successful _despite_ this.

 _No rules_ implies _very low barrier to entry_.

<comment><USER7> I think you mean it's successful _because_ of its lack of rules, and I disagree. WordPress's low barrier to entry stems from a combination of PHP's ubiquity and a positive feedback loop of popularity. More rules wouldn't hurt either of these factors.

<comment><USER36> More like PHP's ubiquity which leads to easy installs for non-developers. The reason wordpress is so successful doesn't revolve around the devs. It's because your everyday blogger can setup a blog in 20 minutes. The dev focus comes from having so many users.

<comment><USER7> That's pretty much what I was trying to convey.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Read this so you can get clued in, jshakes: [http://wpengine.com/2013/03/alex- king-on-the-maturity-of-wor...](http://wpengine.com/2013/03/alex-king-on-the- maturity-of-wordpress/)

See some of the real world issues, not programmer-level gripes you bring up. Which BTW show your lack of creativity in solving problems through thinking outside of the box.

I'll give you an example:

If you don't like get_permalink(), make yourself a get_the_permalink() { return get_permalink(); }

</comment><comment><USER58> I would pay money if someone remade Wordpress on Django (and still kept it compatible with existing plugins and themes).

<comment><USER59> You do realize that WordPress plugins and themes are written in PHP and Django is written in Python, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> <http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html>

</comment><comment><USER61> as a wordpress developer using it as a framework I love this like "WordPress isn't a platform suited to anyone except those unlucky enough to have somehow become WordPress developers."

I'd love to see his vision of a code-cleanup happen to WordPress.

</comment><comment><USER62> Could it be built on top of node.js so it's all Javascript?

<comment><USER12> Considering Node can talk to MySQL - yes. Well, yes BUT.

The "but" comes in when you talk about existing themes and plugins - some are much larger applications, and all are built in PHP. So to migrate, you'd need to reimplement both WordPress itself _and_ various themes and plugins in Node.

Not to mention that you'd need to build traction with developers to keep supporting it. Not every PHP master is also a JS master, so finding buy-in from the existing community will be hard.

Also, remember that PHP comes standard on most shared hosting environments - which is where WordPress is most often installed. Node, however, does not. So once you have developers on board, you have to get hosts on board to help set up the application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> 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.

</comment><comment><USER64> "I'm not going to list all the things that make WP at odds with best practises, but here are the brass tacks"

There is a strange paradox that an infatuation with best practices seldom yields a successful product...because it seldom yields a product at all. And those products that do scratch itches and grow and evolve tend to have widely criticized code bases.

Wikipedia, Wordpress, Firefox, mySQL, Linux...there isn't a successful major open source product that doesn't have legions of code purists telling everyone why they're in dire condition and _if only..._.

Not trying to be cynical, but it is odd how often these sorts of posts appear, always under the pretense that something must be done now or everything is going to fail.

<comment><USER65> These things are not all alike.

Fx has had many man-hours put into it, attempting to reduce their technical debt and improve the efficiency of maintenance work. They know what's still wrong in the browser, and they're working on it, but progress is slow. There's a reason that Mozilla's working on Rust, and it's not just for S&G.

MySQL is so bad that when MariaDB happened, several long-standing architectural issues were cleaned up. Maria's got a lot of improvements that were made in response to MySQL's community not making those improvements.

Linux... I don't understand why you put Linux on this list. The only people complaining about Linux architecture are:

* Tanenbaum followers who believe that microkernels will save us all

* Binary driver authors who want Linux to be more amenable to their evil schemes

* C++ weenies who are offended by Linux's refusal to adopt C++ as other kernels have done

* C hackers who don't like the brace style of Linux

All of these groups have axes to grind; they're not approaching things from some position of "this code is not performant enough" or "if only more things were supported."

WP and Wordpress picked the wrong implementation language. It happens. Migrating them off of PHP is non-trivial. We already know all of this. It's not that we think everything is going to fail; it's more that we have seen Wordpress get hacked so many times over the years and we're sick and tired of it.

Edit: Attempt to salvage list formatting.

<comment><USER66> > WP and Wordpress picked the wrong implementation language.

No they didn't. PHP makes sure you can deploy them just about everywhere for very cheap and without really knowing what you're doing.</comment></comment></comment>


How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> > Fortunately, Americans are beginning to remember what was once lost. Senator > Elizabeth Warren often sounds like she's channeling Wright Patman. Senator > Bernie Sanders stirred enormous enthusiasm in a younger generation more in > touch with their populist souls. Republicans even debated putting antitrust > back in their party platform. President Obama has begun talking about the > problem of monopolies. Renata Hesse, the head of the government's antitrust > division, recently gave a blistering speech repudiating Bork's corporatist > ideas. And none other than Hillary Clinton, in an October 3, 2016, speech on > renewing antitrust vigor, noted that Trump, while a unique figure, also > represents the "broader trends" of big business picking on the little guy.

> Restoring America's anti-monopoly traditions does not mean rejecting what > the Watergate Babies accomplished. It means merging their understanding of a > multicultural democratic society with Brandeis's vision of an "industrial > democracy." The United States must place democracy at the heart of its > commercial sphere once again. That means competition policy, in force, all > the time, at every level. The prevailing culture must be re-geared, so that > the republic may be born anew.</comment>