Something that shouldn't be overlooked is the fact the author is John Graham-Cumming and you are kelvin0. Almost every one in the top 10 leaderboard posts under their real name. They have more respect and credibility than an anonymous poster. It's one of those annoying and readily exploitable flaws of human nature.
That being said, we can clearly not conclude that 'content is king', right? If 'Meta' profile information biases submissions negatively? As mentionned earlier, I am not complaining simply stating a fact. As for YCOMT, it's from a funny episode of a comedy Show I used to watch ... live and learn I guess.
> That being said, we can clearly not conclude that 'content is king', right?
In my humble opinion, yes, content is not king. But, it's more than just allowing people to put a face to the name. You have to fit in. You have to agree with the political views of the majority. You have to agree with the taboos of the majority. There's a reason Michael O'Church and Zed Shaw aren't on that leaderboard, despite the quality of the content they posted.
> You have to fit in. You have to agree with the political views of the majority.
No, you don't; the people with lots of karma don't have homogenous expressed political views, so they can't all agree with the majority, either. How you post about your views is a lot more important than what your views are.
> It ought to be relatively easy. ... Seems like a fairly trivial experiment to run and reproduce.
That depends on what you're testing. "Blood test" and "health test" are ridiculously ambiguous terms. Something like red blood cell counts don't vary much from day to day, but some things, like blood sugar and cortisol, vary hour to hour.
That's something that gets overlooked in these discussions of wordpress. Wordpress has the unique ability to use a single install and backend to manage hundreds of sites. If you need content cross posted across multiple sites, wordpress can do that. If you want to pull an entire column of articles from one site to another, wordpress can do that.
Wordpress has spent a ton of time on multisite features and (as far as I know) there's no other CMS in existence that handles this stuff out of the box. That's why large media companies love it and, I suspect, why a quarter of the internet runs it still when there are faster and more secure alternatives out there.
I've never used it professionally, but dotCMS is a Java- and Elasticsearch-based CMS that has very impressive multisite features [1]. From what I can tell, a lot of its capabilities stem from a design that treats absolutely everything (data, content, static assets, "themes") as a node in a virtual filesystem, or rather a filesystem-per-site, so everyday filesystem operations cover a lot of use cases. I believe you can even manipulate your site(s) via WebDAV to some extent, e.g. to develop a theme in your IDE of choice while saving directly to the site or, more realistically, saving to a private staging copy of the site that lives on the same server, which you can then copy into production from within the dotCMS admin.
I gave some consideration recently to adopting dotCMS for client work to replace an in-house PHP CMS, but although Java-the-language isn't particularly intimidating and dotCMS itself looks fairly self-contained and straightforward to deploy -- Elasticsearch is embedded rather than requiring separate setup, for example -- it's still tied up in the Java ecosystem (OSGi, maven, XML configuration) so there's a lot to get used to for someone approaching it from outside that realm.
> What WP did right is to choose a platform supported EVERYWHERE
When WP was created, their options were PHP or Perl. PHP was by far the hottest thing back then, so what they actually did was use the hot tech of the day and made it work. The reason PHP is supported everywhere is for the same reason; back then it was PHP or Perl via CGI. Python was added later and was also supported EVERYWHERE.
Considering some of the people I've made wordpress sites for couldn't even figure out the wordpress interface, command line anything is a no go for a large percentage of wordpress's intended audience.
Yeah, I'm sure it'd be possible to build on top of Hugo (or many other static site generators) to build something that might be usable for the typical wp customer - but afaik none of them are that out of the box. The most likely alternative I can think of is Ghost: https://ghost.org/
But, I'm not sure how easy it is to customize along the lines that people expect from wp (Now, that could be considered a feature - but it also means it could be a hard sell to someone that just wants a wp site).
If what is needed really is a static site (a "web site"/"homepage") -- I think netlifly looks quite promising:
Actually the command line interface wasn't the deal breaker for me. I was asked to help out creating a website for a tiny organization (< 10 people). Once I found out multiple people would need to collaborate and edit the website it basically eliminated Hugo as a possibility. I suppose they could sync files via Dropbox but as I'm not a dropbox user myself I have no idea how it handles merges. Git is not really a possibility for obvious reasons.
Finally, deployment is the final hurdle. If they wanted to edit a sentence on a WordPress site it's very easy. But with something like Hugo it would be a 3 step process: Edit the file. Build the website. Deploy to your web host.
I worked briefly for a wordpress consultancy last year.
Our main workflow involved using Yeoman, Grunt, NPM, wp (the wordpress command line tool) and vagrant. Locally, we'd run vagrant just so we don't have to monkey around with environment issues (too much). Yeoman, grunt, npm and wp were used in tandem to script the creation of a new wordpress install, install any dependencies needed, run any tools needed through grunt (like sass and JS minifiers), and pull plugins and themes from their separate git repositories. We still had to import the database by hand, though, when setting up our environment as well as add lines to wp-config for however we wanted to handle debugging.
Then we'd write code and check it in via git as with any other project. If you were working on frontend anything (html,css,js) you either ran grunt all the damned time or ran grunt watch. Those of us who had a hard time with the unique programming requirements of wordpress (escaping, sanitizing, formatting) used phpcs to automate that.
As for deployment, we'd just go through the same setup on the server that we do locally. Updates were pushed via git.
The fundamental problem my company runs into with WP is that only a theme can be meaningfully checked into version control. Everything else, including installation of plugins is coupled with entries in the database.
That wasn't my experience. We separated functional features into separate plugins (so they could be disabled or enabled on a site by site basis) and had no problem using version control with them. In fact, one project had some government security problems and required each plugin to be in its own repo. I wouldn't suggest that, but it works.
the database also includes changes necessarily made on the production instance, like comments to blog posts
That was something I found aggravating that was never really addressed at the company I worked at. When new people were brought on to a project, they'd get a mysql dump of the staging environment. After that, as new features were added, you were responsible for adding your own test data to see if those features worked. As for production, the changes made that were specific to the production database were made manually in production. When a new plugin was pushed, you had to log into the production instances manually and turn the new plugin on. Luckily, there are hooks you can use to automate any setup or teardown of plugins when they get turned on and off respectively.
Read Rhetoric by Aristotle. You're using what he calls Dialectic (facts and figures) to convince people. Most people either don't care about facts and figures or can't understand them. You need to make appeals to emotion, or rhetoric. As for how to effectively communicate in Rhetoric, if I knew that I'd be far more popular than I currently am. :) Maybe ask tptacek for some pointers?
Something else to keep in mind: speaking from a place of authority might help as well. On this matter, you have a serious disadvantage. An anonymous person on the internet will never be able to convince most people that NASA is wrong about space. Unless you're literally a rocket science and can prove you're an expert in the field, most people will believe NASA because they trust NASA.
I don't understand the hard on people around here have for predicting the collapse of sports. It's like the very idea of getting revenge on the jocks makes you all salivate. Revenge of the nerds writ large? Or is it an extension of the 'toxic testosterone' propaganda?
