WordPress

So let me get this straight, You are saying that WordPress is BS because some of the moron bloggers that talk about SEO give bad advice?? I don't understand. I mean if some one from Automattic said that WordPress is the best blogging software ever, then that might be open for debate. And if they said something like WordPress is the best for SEO, then yeah that's pretty BS. But you can't call something BS just because some idiot blogger doesn't know what they are talking about, I mean hell everything in the universe is BS then!

geez … there were websites before WordPress came along… they didn't take all day long to load… and set the bar higher than anyone “who can press submit”. That's partly why the blogosphere is mostly a WoDS…

That is one of the reasons, between tons of other more, why I do not use WP for professional sites, not even for blogs and I came to develop my own CMS along years.

With my personal blog I'll stick with WordPress. I've never used WordPress for bigger projects than this. And I won't, obviously.

Darren, given a permalink structure like /category/page/ you can just upload /category/page/index.html|php|htm|… (DirectoryIndex index.html index.php index.htm …) and view it. WordPress doesn't get invoked when Apache finds something that matches the requested URI on disk. When you upload /index.html (given the directory index sort order above) you disable WordPress's main page (example.com/). So you don't need the “category/” thingy for your purposes.

I wouldn't use /category/anything at all, because a post can have more than one category assigned, and then WordPress uses the category with the lowest primary key value or so in URIs. Also, when you can assign a piece of content more than one category, or tag, categorizing must not be expressed in its URI.

Watch out for Peter Young, maybe he'll put an end to your misery.

its open source. i believe you expect people to give their voice for the software improvement rather than rant so harshly against it.

Hey Sebastian,
Nice insightful post.

One question though: how much expected traffic could actually be a bad signal to consider WP as the CMS to build a website on?

Yes. of course I know programming and been building dynamic sites w/000's of pages for years. If you don't know programming and how to build a site other than w/Wordpress then I strongly recommend you hookup w/someone that does and start to learn how to build a real site. And Yes all my clients can update their own sites if they ask… there are lots of components to upload and edit or create files.

Me and Murphy are mates. He is a bollocks really and knows exactly when to cause crap so I know what you mean. :)

Perhaps this is a dumb question – but why is there one camp that rants on application performance, and another camp that rants on server configuration and performance — but these groups seem to hang out at two very different bars.

You can dramatically improve a WordPress-driven site's performance the same way you can improve Drupal, Joomla, your CMS de jure, or even hand-coded HTML by properly setting server cache control headers, utilize output caching, application caching, single-spriting structural elements, etc.

On the flip-side, you can slow your bad-@#* Rails site or custom-coded PHP app to a crawl if you no-cache, no-store the entire thing.

Isn't the real point – get a web architect that understands servers, apps, performance, and databases. Hire one if you can, at least buy one a beer if you must, but never let anyone with “SEO” in their job description design your web site architecture. Of course, letting a DBA design your UI is probably not a good idea either. Don't order sushi in a steak place.

And lets get the server performance and app performance people in the same bar so end customers like me only have to buy one round?

Do you mean like your SEO site? No offense, but that thing looks like it was designed about 12 years ago and is in huge need of a fresh look. If I built a site like that for a local client they would think I am crazy an run away screaming.

ROFL! I was just about to give WP a try, good I didnt. Maybe somebody should give them a hint to store all URIs in a seperate table and give it a 10 or 20 byte index on the URL column. Its not really difficult to figure that out.

There's no such thing as a dumb question, provided the questioner isn't dumb. ;-)

I don't totally agree, because a few SEOs skillfully utilize every bar out there, and have lots of experience with all sorts of booze.

Seriously, good Web architects are rare, and when you request an expert, as a rule you don't get one, or one with the wrong skill set. In other words, the problem persists in eternity, there's no way out.

Ooops, looks like I struck a little nerve there. All that because of a little design critic? You must be a bit unstable. First, be a man and swear like everyone else you pussy. It is fuck not fck. I am pretty sure wit a site called SEO Bullshit they don't care if you cuss. Second, your site may have the best structure ever (highly doubtful) but that still doesn't take away from the fact I would never take you seriously landing on that piece of shit. Your tsworldofdesigns.com site is just as much a joke. Dude, you started this with your sarcastic bullshit response to my first comment. Truth is, I was hoping you would blow up like this.

Yeah, I am anonymous. I like it that way. Keeping under the radar is a good thing. I may use WordPress for my sites but they look a hell of a lot better and load and function just as fast as your turd of a site. Yes, your site isn't pulling off blazing speed, I tried it. Google indexed 145 pages to your site in my Data Center. With your “programming knowledge” I would think a site that size would load faster for me (no its not my connection either). I'm not saying it is slow, but it isn't any faster then an average cached WordPress install with 145 pages either.

I agree, except for the “functionality is equally important as scalability” part, provided I got that right.

If someone needs lots of functionality for a low traffic site that never will get slashdotted, WordPress is free so why not give it a try. Fuck scalability.

If someone aims at high traffic volumes, then scalability, robustness, speed and such criteria become more important.

So it's not all about WordPress vs. Whatever, or free blogging tools vs. CMSs. It's about the fine art of making the best decision based on all facts and assumptions, not to forget financial limits. Pre-launch that's not easy. Prototyping or even starting a site that has great potential with something like WordPress can be a wise decision, too, if a later migration to a more scalable system is a budgeted option.

But Sebastian, you can't make a very convincing argument by just making statements and no supporting ideas. For example, tell me WHY the database design is screwed. What are the performance issues? If you were going to rewrite WordPress how would YOU design the database?? I have built many custom CMSs in my day and it seems that everyone builds theirs differently. The only way that we can learn from each other is compare techniques. Or atleast describe our thoughts fully instead of just saying “totally screwed database design”, and thats it.

Joe, of course I can do that in a rant ;-) but actually I didn't “make a very convincing argument by just making statements and no supporting ideas”.

A database design is screwed when it's not normalized, for example when someone stores instances of a not modeled entity in a text field of a generic options table. There are very few (technical) reasons for denormalization: usually performance issues as a result of other design errors (could apply to WordPress), or restrictions/insufficiencies of particular databases (doesn't apply here), or the necessity to answer multi-dimensional analytical queries (doesn't apply). I've mentioned that.

A database design is screwed when it lacks an abstraction of important objects. I've mentioned that, and I've provided a clue how one could persist URIs as an attribute of various objects.

I'd fire a developer who names a foreign key other than the primary key it references, and I'd question a foreign key's right to exist in a table when it references an already referenced entity with another role. I do not allow arrays as attributes in database tables, even when the DBMS supports them, and in most cases I'd fire a developer who stores serialized arrays in text fields. However, there's no rule without exception, and in extremely rare cases breaking such rules can make sense. When a database design reveals at the very first first sight that its developers don't know the rules, but are way too used to exceptions and lazy workarounds due to lack of experience and education, I call it crap.

What would I do when I'd have to revamp WordPress? I'd throw away its architecture, hire top-notch developers I can work with, and start over at the white board. It would cost Matt Mullenweg a fortune, but the result would be a scalable high-performance CMS that comes with functionality every other blogging tool out there can only dream of. Should I do that in a blog post, for free? Nope. I'm not this kind of idiot.

I'm aware that all this sounds arrogant. It's not really arrogant. It's based on experience. I agree that learning from each other is important. I share a thought every now and then, and daily I learn something from my peers, or from reading brilliant stuff. But just because there's an Internet where a mega ton of good information is available for free, that doesn't mean everyone can become wise by reading brilliant stuff, and it doesn't mean that a developer without years and years of experience can become a good developer.

Without experience knowledge is worthless. That means that sharing design patterns that are based on decades of professional experience can be pointless for savvy developers, because publishing those doesn't help the noobs who can't assimilate them, and sharing for free doesn't pay the author who makes a living from her/his hard earned skills.

I'm not arrogant enough to say that I'm brilliant, but I've worked with brilliant folks. I do know that my work experience is worth something, therefore I write about it every once in a while. I owe many great folks who helped me out, so I try to pay back to the community — but there's a threshold.

I'm not sure the codex is accurate. If you're right, then Rob deserves a BBQ party featuring the grilling of his balls.

Hi, I run a large WordPress-powered site. It's called WordPress.com and it got 1.8 billion pageviews last month, about 900 million of those directly from Google. (Is that the SEO thing?) I found that it scales great, and it's easy to scale up in a horizontal fashion cheaply and efficiently. Sometimes we get links from the homepage of Yahoo, or host blogs about Apple keynotes that get over 1,000 pageviews per second, and it works great.

We also share all of the improvements we've made to the core of WordPress so every version gets better, and we release all of our plugins and infrastructure information so other people can use a 100% Open Source stack to do exactly what we've done.

If you're having trouble, and your site is smaller than ours, maybe get in touch and we can help you through whatever is causing problems.

comment of the year.

nice response. print screen.

Is this blog on wordpress?

I can tell you the answer to this – a shit load of traffic. We run one WordPress site with over 80,000 posts, 40,000 tags and a couple of hundred categories taking over 1,000 posts per day from around 5,000 authors. We serve 250,000 daily pageloads. All one one medium sized box, that costs very little. Its about optimizing your setup.

Yes, WordPress may not have the best database structure you would like if you built it ground up right now (caveats all over the place) but, with a little work, it can scale pretty effectively – or, put simply, effectively enough for the 99% of websites which are smaller than ours.

If you can't afford $250 a month on hosting for the scales we are talking here, then you should sell your busy website to me, or give up.

The database is poorly structured, but so what, it works for most people. For free. Great news for starting projects (as you rightly point out (a climb down?) above.