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A Replacement for WordPress


Gene Steinberg

Forum Super Hero
Staff member
As WordPress becomes older, fatter, there may be a neat alternative, Habari.

Our main portals (The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio, The Tech Night Owl LIVE — Your Ultimate Tech Radio Resource and The Tech Night Owl — Cutting-Edge Tech Commentary) are all powered by WordPress. We moved to WordPress in 2005, so it's been a long time.

But I'm wondering if Habari may be a potential platform for the future.

Here's the link:

Habari Project

I'll be setting up a test site to test it out and see if there's a potential here, but part of that will depend on not losing features, and being able to migrate our content. The Web experts in our midst are welcome to comment.
 
As WordPress becomes older, fatter, ..

For "older" see matured, tested, proved. It has a larger developer base and more resources out there to educate and fill in the gaps in your knowledge.

For fatter I would say that that could be because there are plugins installed that could possibly be removed - can you justify each plugin that is installed, if you can, then is it really fatter?

It is easily possible to have lean installs of Wordpress, add some caching strategies and you're golden.

You already know it, are familiar with it's quirks and it's update patterns.

Have you got a cheat sheet so you can compare and then tick off each feature needed vs wanted.

I'm not against Hibari, or any others, but I would just caution that you move to a.n.other platform for the right reasons overall and not just because it may appear to be faster or the latest offering in a particular product space. It may be quicker and more efficient to tweak what you have.

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Let me get technical: Our server has a PHP cache (xCache), and a WordPress caching plugin, and we work hard to optimize WordPress. The question is whether it's still the right tool, or if there are better ones out there. It's important to review such things from time to time.
 
Let me get technical: Our server has a PHP cache (xCache), and a WordPress caching plugin, and we work hard to optimize WordPress. The question is whether it's still the right tool, or if there are better ones out there. It's important to review such things from time to time.

Absolutely, not questioning the strategy - it's good to regularly review. I'm just saying it's good to have some objective comparators as well as the subjective ones you'll carry into such a review.

Hope it goes well.
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Just two cents...

I did web development for a while and became consumed with finding the "right" cms. Looked at hundreds and installed dozens. The big three wound up being the only legitimate choices (drupal wordpress and joomla) for me, not because of the core, but because of the addons. I can work some PHP, but I can't program from scratch, so I needed a large repository with options and choices in plugins. My clients never had a dime for paid software and so the open source plugins were essential. And I never knew what custom feature someone would ask for.

Although I liked other systems (some better than wordpress) I went with wordpress in the end. All about the addons.... Hibari, like many others, looks nice, but their plugins are very skimpy. I clicked 10 plugins on this page: Available Plugins - Habari Project and almost none of them went to a viable download page. Most went to a page not found error.

That's not good.

I agree that the mature packages, like wordpress, get old and slow and sometimes TOO feature heavy, but unless you can write your own plugins, hibari does not seem to be ready...yet.

Unless I've missed something. Which is always possible. Maybe probable.
 
Just two cents...

I did web development for a while and became consumed with finding the "right" cms. Looked at hundreds and installed dozens. The big three wound up being the only legitimate choices (drupal wordpress and joomla) for me, not because of the core, but because of the addons. I can work some PHP, but I can't program from scratch, so I needed a large repository with options and choices in plugins. My clients never had a dime for paid software and so the open source plugins were essential. And I never knew what custom feature someone would ask for.

Although I liked other systems (some better than wordpress) I went with wordpress in the end. All about the addons.... Hibari, like many others, looks nice, but their plugins are very skimpy. I clicked 10 plugins on this page: Available Plugins - Habari Project and almost none of them went to a viable download page. Most went to a page not found error.

That's not good.

I agree that the mature packages, like wordpress, get old and slow and sometimes TOO feature heavy, but unless you can write your own plugins, hibari does not seem to be ready...yet.

Unless I've missed something. Which is always possible. Maybe probable.

I second Shazzbutter's analysis. However personally, because I know how easy it is to build your own webpage, I decided to do that instead. After all, these CMS platforms are only just that ... web pages, and my site does what I need it to do better than any of those template driven CMS platforms. Building and evolving your own site is as easy as getting a free WYSIWYG editor and following the help files. Nowadays I rarely bother with my WYSIWYG editor and just use a plain text editor. It's not hard. It's just time consuming.
 
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As an Enterprise Java Developer and ex PHP developer who has had previous experience working commercially with various different platforms and frameworks, I can honestly say that under the hood, Wordpress is a big fat mess. It mixes procedural code with OO code. Suffers from bloat and encourages developers to write even more horrible PHP code then necessary. PHP isn't the nicest language to start off design wise anyway.
 
If you need an extra pair of hands on any code stuff, I am willing to help. I code in Java and PHP mainly but I am not limited to that skill set
 
Assuming we stick with WordPress for the site, and XenForo for the forum, are you able to work with us to improve the look and feel and such?
 
Yeah I can always help out with front end stuff too, I have done my bit of jQuery and what not. I can DM you my linkedin account URL if you would like to see some credentials
 
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