Notices by Eaton (eaton@phire.place), page 7

@sivy Oh, man, now I want to get my giant family tree of webtech finished…

@trochee curious if you ever read Galatea 2.2 during that stretch?

@trochee

@skykiss @blogdiva I hear people say “every accusation from them is a confession” a lot, but IME the accusations are most often a rationalization. “They are doing a thing so terrible, it justifies doing the terrible thing we want to so — in defense.” Less what they HAVE done than what they yearn to do, and must justify.

@foone this reminds me of the time i released an open source utility to pipe a server’s error logs to a twitter account

@jalefkowit Hey, this one doesn’t contain new, incidentally damning asmissions, so it’s atill an improvement

@adrienne you know me well enough to understand how amazing it is that i am speechless

@chx Have you considered AEM

@gdemet “in light of recent events” feels like an extremely heavy phrase in our circles right now, lol

@jpanzer @katrinakatrinka It depresses me how on the nose this was. https://medium.com/@eaton/humanity-for-subscribers-only-2dc1a4453cff

@chx we have many sins to answer for, my friend.

On the other hand, we never stored criticial field data in JSON in HTML comments in the body field…

@gdemet i do think some of this is also centralized control of the roadmap. There have been outstanding, mergable proposals for CCK-like functionality in WP core rolling around for close to a decade!

The challenge for architecture advocates is remaining rooted in real-world pros and cons, and recognizing that for some projects and teams the investment in doing it “the right way" (for any particular value of right) will never be amortized. Choosing a simple-but-not-scalable approach, or even simple-but-only-scalable-with-lots-of-elbow-grease, can make sense.

It's very similar to the “Modular Page Builders versus Structured Content" story in the broader CMS world. Fundamentally, only people who specialize in modeling structured content really care whether a site was built using structured content.

Other people might care about the downstream stuff that structured content *makes possible* (like reuse of components across different sections of the site, enforced consistency, potential multi-channel delivery, etc etc)…

You're right, though — that looming upgrade complexity is exactly what has kept so many Drupal 7 sites from making the move forward.

@jalefkowit That was actually one of the significant outcomes of the Drupal 8 refactoring; while it's not quite as “your 12y old plugin will still work" as WordPress, the bad old days of tossing your site and starting over with each major upgrade are basically gone.

I have a long list of Drupal modules I released, gave away to other devs, and still keep half an eye on. The Drupal 7 to 8 upgrades were torturous, but 8 -> 9 -> 10 -> 11 has been a series of minor nudges.

The degree to which that *just hasn't mattered* for the broader WordPress ecosystem — or at least not enough to take the edge off of its 40%+ share of the web — is a lesson for every architectural purist.

On the other hand, the degree to which accessibility-hostile over-5s-load-time popup sites built with a stack of WP plugins are the norm is a lesson for everybody who says that there are no consequences.

For WordPress, the price of keeping the cruft around and just layering new stuff on top of it is different. "Its last several years of big additions have resulted in a React application running on top of the PHP blogging tool that saves complex page layout metadata as serialized JSON inside HTML comments stored in the database.

You can imagine the third-party plugin landscape.

Drupal 8 was a pretty huge overhaul to that system — WordPress never got a similar clean sweep, and like the older versions of Drupal you can poke around in the guts and find late-aughts code and conventions that are a little eyebrow-raising.

For Drupal, the price was a loooooong tail of sites that never really upgraded. Drupal *11* shipped recently, but Drupal 7 still limps along in ‘Long Term Support’ mode because almost half the world's Drupal sites still run it.

I don't mean that in a particularly disparaging way, either. The WordPress project's leadership has focused very deliberately on layering new site-builder and light-content-creator features on top of the underlying WP server-side code.

Drupal went down a different path — iterating on under the hood architectural changes to enable more complex customization and inter-operation between plugins, etc. By Drupal 7 that was really hitting the limits of “throw a bunch of PHP at the global namespace.”