December 6th, 2010

WordPress

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Tags: infographic, power, testking, WordPress

Responses

Comments

Matthew Gerring says:

12/7/2010 at 5:52 am

that’s “Mullenweg”
- Don Gilbert (2 comments.) says:
  
  12/7/2010 at 7:57 am
  
  “Mullenwig” – maybe he’ll change his name to that once he loses his hair, but for now, it should remain “Mullenweg” – lol
Shawal (2 comments.) says:

12/7/2010 at 10:30 am

I really admire wordpress cause I’m is one of the user….

I had 3 blog and it all are using wordpress as the platform.

WordPress are awesome.
GazOutEast (5 comments.) says:

12/7/2010 at 8:26 pm

Personally, I would not refer to the graphic as “the power of WordPress” – I think that’s overselling the graphic.

A more appropriate moniker might be “the reach of WordPress” – the number crunching certainly gives indication of that.

The power of WordPress is not in the numbers, it is in what it enables for its users, and although there will be broad commonalities, everyone’s aims and wishes will be slightly different. Any time WordPress enables them to achieve their aim or wish, then WordPress has empowered them – that’s “the true power of WordPress”.

But the “Mullingwig” and the core devs need to be careful – this year they have demonstrated a number of misguided directional decisions
– unwanted_P_dangit,
– user & visitor behaviour reporting (surrepticiously) to a 3rd party marketing company via a massive javascript trojan in blog footers through Akismet,
– blindly killing VHOSTS correct functioning in the WPMU to WP 3.0 merger, then having to bring it back for 3.0.2/3.1 (see tickets in trac),
– banning link-cloaking plugins just in time for wp.me to enter core via WordPress.com Stats plugin,
– and the list goes on.

Amongst unbiased industry professionals, there is a rising concern that the utopian ideals and empowerment of early WordPress is going down the same community-to-insanity route that eBay have driven over these last three years. It took eBay ten years for management to float above their sense of reality, it sometimes looks like WordPress is heading there in less.

Be careful WordPress, don’t rise too far above your roots, too many people love you too much to see you follow the old adage of “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”. As my Mum is fond of saying, “Don’t get too big for your boots”.

Gaz
- dgrut (13 comments.) says:
  
  12/8/2010 at 11:29 am
  
  agree. at least it free dude.
- GazOutEast (5 comments.) says:
  
  12/8/2010 at 1:16 pm
  
  Apologies – in my typing haste, I attributed the gathering of user data for passing to a 3rd party marketing org, to Akismet. That should have been to the WordPress.com Stats plugin now maintained by Automattic rather than the original developer. That harvesting action has been publicly admitted to by Matt in forum discussions.
  
  Personally, I do not want my site visitors onsite behaviour patterns harvested and passed to a third party for their profit. That is not why I create the content on my sites, and for others to profit from my labour without my consent, is a gross betrayal by WordPress. In some circles, it would be considered commercial espionage, and in some countries, it (the harvesting and passing of user data) is illegal.
- Joen (2 comments.) says:
  
  12/9/2010 at 5:30 am
  
  You gribe about a lot of issues, but you forget the most central value of WordPress.
  
  It’s open source. If you’re serious enough about these gripes, you have the law-given right to fork your own path in the road, and go your own way.
  
  And I don’t say that in a “if you don’t like it, go to Russia” kind of way, but in a this is the power of open source way.
  
  Back when Mark Pilgrim switched to WordPress, he did it because Movable Type was never open source, and some of their decisions didn’t sit well with him. So he wrote a long post called Freedom 0, where-in he detailed that with WordPress, even if he would come to disagree with some of the decisions being made, he would have options. WordPress was not a dead end for him.
  
  That is especially true because the bulk of your gripes seem to refer to the free Akismet and Stats services, both of which are not only optional services, but opt-in.
  
  Criticism is always welcome, but just like a Facebook account isn’t mandatory, neither are Akismet or Stats plugins.
  - GazOutEast (5 comments.) says:
    
    12/9/2010 at 11:52 am
    
    Joen
    
    Your response is of course correct in all technical aspects, however you seem to ignore the ethical aspects of what has happened both with the site-breaking rewriting of URLs via the unwanted_P_dangit and with the unannounced introduction of the stats plugin’s customer behaviour harvesting.
    
    The Open Source Foundation’s criteria for open source software requires that all changes to the core of an application be performed in an open and transparent manner, allowing full community input prior to those changes being implemented.
    
    The first the world knew about the capital_P_dangit alteration was when it appeared in the core change list on the day of WP 3.0’s release – there was no discussion of it on trac, nor any opportunity for community or professional input to the side effects of it other than for the members of the WordPress inner circle.
    
    A similar entry path appears to have been applied to the spyware now in the footer of every site that has the latest version of WordPress.com Stats plugin – Matt is on record as saying that no matter how much people complain about it, removal is not going to happen. Makes me wonder how the US judiciary feel about such statements – not that I can invoke them as I’m not American and I live on the opposite side of the planet, but I can raise awareness of the issue.
    
    As to forking the package – you know fine well that’s a disingenuous argument – there are few people with the full set of skills to do so and maintain vibrancy and security in such a mammoth package, and fewer with the other resources needed to do so and launch it in any way that would gain market traction.
    
    That said, I do expect to see forks emerging over the next few years, there have just been too many incidents of “Matt’s way or the highway” of late – and as many’s a dominant corporation have found throughout history, that is the fastest way to generate competition that already has your mistakes on record, therefore don’t need the learning curve and costs of making them again.
    
    WordPress was great, and I stress WAS, because of late they have been causing a lot of pauses for thought, and the hosting industry is starting to introduce restrictive measures against sites built on the package – I discover more of them (hosts) doing so, on a weekly basis, and it’s not because of WPMS in 3.0+, it’s because of a security paranoia that’s spreading around the entire package.
    
    Just as Microsoft had to pause development and spend almost a decade addressing bugs and security issues, so will WordPress sometime soon, though they won’t need a decade to do it.
    
    Gaz
    - James Huff (109 comments.) says:
      
      12/9/2010 at 1:02 pm
      
      I assure you, if you use the WordPress.com Stats plugin, your stats are never harvested for profit by Automattic or anyone else for that matter.
      
      Your stats are stored on the WordPress.com servers simply out of convenience to you. Many stat databases can quickly reach into the hundreds of mb in size, which can be a burden on users with smaller hosting accounts.
      
      Your so-called “spyware” simply collects anonymous metrics, like what type of browser you’re using. In particular, this metric is used to keep track of the popularity trend in today’s browsers, nothing more. At no time is any identifying or personal information collected.
      
      You may be shocked to know that thousands of popular sites, including Google, do the very same thing, and most are actually using the same system employed by the WordPress.com Stats Plugin.
      
      If this still concerns you, all you need to do is block third-party cookies in your browser. This will prevent the WordPress.com Stats Plugin, and any other site for that matter, from collection anonymous metrics.
      - GazOutEast (5 comments.) says:
        
        12/9/2010 at 1:30 pm
        
        James – From the tech situation you describe in your reply, I take it you have not read this thread at WordPress –
        
        http://wordpress.org/support/t.....javascript
        
        I’d also be very interested in hearing how blocking 3rd party cookies in my own browser can prevent WordPress/Quantcast from harvesting user behaviour on my sites – that’d be some feat of programming that would.
        
        Regarding what QuantCast do or do not harvest – have you looked closely at what they do as a company, and what the javascript in the footer collects? It collects a lot more than just the browser used – and Matt has admitted that.
      - James Huff (109 comments.) says:
        
        12/9/2010 at 2:34 pm
        
        True, I don’t make it my mission to read every single topic on the WordPress Support Forums. It would probably take a week just to read all of the posts made in a single day.
        
        You are correct in that fact that I had this particular case confused with a similar one. I do apologize about that.
        
        However, by the very topic that you linked to, you are wrong in your accusation that the code simply exists to maliciously collect data.
        
        Per Matt’s response, “We’re going to use this to provide some cool features around uniques and people counting.”
        
        As Matt also suggested, you’re more than welcome to not use the plugin.
    - Joen says:
      
      12/9/2010 at 1:11 pm
      
      In my experience, the best open source projects — Firefox is an example — are the ones where tough decisions are being made in order to keep a tight ship. That will sometimes mean changes not everyone agrees with. In the Firefox example, Mozilla recently decided to do tabs on top, which a lot of people didn’t like. But for usability reasons, there are a lot of sense in make such a change. In the same way, WordPress is in a constant state of flux, and in order to improve the product, sometimes breaking changes happen, and sometimes changes happen which are inevitably going to annoy some users. That is the nature of open source; everyone has an opinion.
      
      If you feel strongly enough for your gripes, open source gives you the tools to address each and every issue you bring up.
      
      In the mean time, WordPress, the Stats plugin and Akismet are all optional services.
      - GazOutEast (5 comments.) says:
        
        12/9/2010 at 1:33 pm
        
        Agreed, they are optional – and I am replacing the stats plugin on all my sites because of it.
        
        I’m confused about your continually dragging Akismet back into it after I exonerated them earlier – have you found something dodgy that it’s doing that I haven’t twigged yet?
Scott (2 comments.) says:

12/8/2010 at 12:03 am

Jeff, you can’t get much more clear than this, can you? Great infographic and thanks for sharing it here. WordPress offers so much versatility to such a wide range of needs. The customers I build websites for are always pleased and often amazed at how flexible they can be with their online marketing, lead generation, advertising, etc.

After seeing your post here, I wrote a quick piece, A Picture is Worth…, that zeros in on the needs of the people I like to do work for.

Thanks again!