Tumblr is making the move to WordPress. After its 2019 acquisition by WordPress.com parent company Automattic in a $3 million fire sale, the new owner has
Not as drastic as the headline makes it out to be, or at least so they claim.
“We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction,” the post explained. “We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside,” it noted.
We’ll see how that actually works out. Tumblr’s backend has always seemed rather… makeshift, so I’m curious to see how they manage to do that. Given Tumblr’s technical eccentricities, a backend migration could probably do a lot of good for the functionality of the site, if done properly. I have my doubts that WordPress’ engineers will be given the time and resources to do a full overhaul/refactor though, so I’m fully expecting even more janky, barely functional code stapling the two systems together.
is it decades of hacky code, or decades of battle tested code?
I haven’t touched wordpress in… many years, but I’ve seen far too many developers look at old code and call it junk… only to break things horrifically when they attempt a rewrite.
Wordpress has a reputation for the most moronic security issues. Especially when it’s built on PHP, which has its own reputation for moronic security issues. And that’s saying nothing about the quality of plugin developers or plugin code.
I’ve worked on Wordpress sites, plugins, and themes. That was many years ago now, but I doubt it’s changed that much. If anything, it’s mostly benefited from improvements to PHP.
Has to rank as one of the most exploited pieces of software ever.
Definitely be not aided by the fact it’s targeting an audience without the skills or knowledge to adequately configure, maintain and monitor it. And the plugin community only makes the vulnerability exposure worse.
Kind of the old Windows vs Mac problem though. It gets so many exploits because it is so ridiculously popular. No one is going to bother looking for exploits in shit that no one uses right? I’m sure they’ve got problems like any project but I’m not convinced they’re THAT bad. Not to mention a lot of exploits you see are plugins doing dumb shit, not WP itself.
Not as drastic as the headline makes it out to be, or at least so they claim.
We’ll see how that actually works out. Tumblr’s backend has always seemed rather… makeshift, so I’m curious to see how they manage to do that. Given Tumblr’s technical eccentricities, a backend migration could probably do a lot of good for the functionality of the site, if done properly. I have my doubts that WordPress’ engineers will be given the time and resources to do a full overhaul/refactor though, so I’m fully expecting even more janky, barely functional code stapling the two systems together.
WordPress is built on decades of hacky code, probably more so than Tumblr. I would be shocked if this is an improvement.
is it decades of hacky code, or decades of battle tested code?
I haven’t touched wordpress in… many years, but I’ve seen far too many developers look at old code and call it junk… only to break things horrifically when they attempt a rewrite.
Hacky.
Wordpress has a reputation for the most moronic security issues. Especially when it’s built on PHP, which has its own reputation for moronic security issues. And that’s saying nothing about the quality of plugin developers or plugin code.
I’ve worked on Wordpress sites, plugins, and themes. That was many years ago now, but I doubt it’s changed that much. If anything, it’s mostly benefited from improvements to PHP.
Has to rank as one of the most exploited pieces of software ever.
Definitely be not aided by the fact it’s targeting an audience without the skills or knowledge to adequately configure, maintain and monitor it. And the plugin community only makes the vulnerability exposure worse.
Kind of the old Windows vs Mac problem though. It gets so many exploits because it is so ridiculously popular. No one is going to bother looking for exploits in shit that no one uses right? I’m sure they’ve got problems like any project but I’m not convinced they’re THAT bad. Not to mention a lot of exploits you see are plugins doing dumb shit, not WP itself.