As someone who has just spent the last two weeks attempting to secure and standardize a WordPress install, my sincerest condolences to Wired's system administrators.<p>WordPress has achieved the complexity promised by Zawinski's Law, and is a true nightmare to attempt to secure. Not only do you have software which writes its own full URLs (including the scheme), you have software which checks and optionally triggers a built-in cron with every request, one PHP file which rules them all, an average of four cookies for every visit (which messes with some caching attempts), a mish-mash of JS and CSS files, static assets spread throughout the wordpress base, every plugin, and every theme, executable PHP in the DB...<p>It can even install its own plugins, if you give it the credentials to FTP to the server which hosts it.<p>I'm glad this project is nearing its completion. The promises made by Wordpress to content creators is backed by the nightmares of system administrators.<p>Zawinski's Law: “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”<p>EDIT:<p>Dear WordPress Sysadmins:<p>You still have some work to do in securing your site. For example, I can tell just from your headers that you're running on Apache 2.4.6, on PHP 5.6.6, and using Varnish 4 as your caching mechanism from your somewhat verbose headers.<p>Good luck!
As a developer who spends 90% of my time on WordPress, I'm really glad to read about this.<p>WordPress is a great way to organize content on the web and has a robust developer community. It's always improving. Love it!
Here's a talk from WordCamp 2014 about (at least part of) this:<p><a href="https://wordpress.tv/2014/11/01/kathleen-vignos-migrating-17-wp-blogs-on-wired-com-into-one-wordpress-install/" rel="nofollow">https://wordpress.tv/2014/11/01/kathleen-vignos-migrating-17...</a>
Some more information for the curious: <a href="http://builtwith.com/wired.com" rel="nofollow">http://builtwith.com/wired.com</a><p>Their theme is called "Phoenix".<p>Being a "small time" WordPress developer I'm always fascinated by "big media" implementations of WordPress, and their decided upon hosting/server setup.<p>Can't say I'm thrilled with the new Wired.com design (those category icons...ouch), but it's always been somewhat of an ugly duckling, and I'm happy to see they're still taking changes.
I love how much faster the new site feels. Seems like before I'd load it up and some content would take 30+ seconds to load but everything I touch on the page all but leaps out to respond to my click. It's pretty wonderful and a welcome change.<p>Not sure if I like the idea of a dynamic news feed. It's one of my least favorite "features" of Facebook given that I have a harder time filtering what I have or haven't read. Seems to be the way the modern web is heading though. At least looking forward to see how Wired's implementation of it works out.
Having only recently begun to poke around at the Wordpress Multi-Site database layout thanks to having to take over responsibility for an 8000+ blog morass of an install, I can say that the hacky way in which Wordpress achieved multi-site capability would actually make this transition relatively simple. Other than ensuring user IDs in the database were in sync, the core blog tables themselves just need to be imported with slightly tweaked names, since each sub-blog in multi-site WP has its own independent set of tables.
of note -- new yorker also transitioned to a wordpress backed system recently:<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/business/media/the-new-yorker-alters-its-online-strategy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/business/media/the-new-yor...</a>
Some problems with the subscribe CTA in the sidebar (<a href="https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/wired/93911?source=Failsafe&pos_name=AMS_WIR_DESKTOP_FAILSAFE" rel="nofollow">https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/wired/93911?source=Fai...</a>)<p>* The Customer Service link is broken.<p>* It doesn't say what you'll pay after the initial $5.<p>* It doesn't explain the GQ promotion. Is it 5 issues, $5 for 6, something else?<p>Also, it would be re-assuring to see the to-be-billed amount near the Subscribe button. Because of the other issues on the page, I don't quite trust the header which is just an image made by a designer.<p>I was interested enough to click but too unsure to follow through, so hopefully someone from Wired/Conde will see this and fix some of these issues.
Wired.com also upped their ads from 3 to 5 on their homepage. Also page design is to make squares exactly match high value ad sizes. Almost as desperate as Pandora's two ads in a row that started happening the past few months
One of the main reason I am using Drupal and not WordPress is that the WordPress community seem to prefer more paid "premium" stuff over FOSS ones. Take Drupal Commerce for example, you have access to all of the plugins but you only need to pay for support. For wordpress, it's a completely different story, either pay for a full version of woocommerce with all the bells and whistles, or stick with using the half-baked "basic" version, lacking crucial features. While I understand the need for monetization, for startups and new companies this model is very pricey compared to the Drupal one.
FYI if your browser zoom isn't the default 100% all the graphics on the page have their sides clipped....<p>At first I thought the publisher had changed their name to just "WIRE" as part of a rebranding.
I wonder if they are building their own "longform feature article builder" or if they'll be using something like the Aesop Story Engine Wordpress plugin.
On this page at the bottom there is a bug in the rendering of the boxes with other articles, the word 'newsletter' partially overlaps the box next to it (firefox).<p><a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/02/ellen-paos-lawyer-says-performance-reviews-changed-kleiner-lawsuit/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/2015/02/ellen-paos-lawyer-says-performa...</a>
I don't mean to be snarky, but is there something terribly interesting going on here? The only bit that seemed somewhat interesting was the "AI page curation" tool, but they hardly touched on that other than to mention that it was a Grails application, which was then ported to CakePHP, which was then ported to be a WP plugin.
I never realized there would be so much junk to haul through when trying to upgrade websites to these modern interfaces. It makes me wonder if this problem of really bad code is widespread in the industry or just among amateur web developers.
I wish they had a section where you can see all the articles in chronological order (newer to older). they made a latest news section but it doesn't look ordered.