I once used extract() in my code a couple years ago and I'm still debugging it.

@Howdy_McGee hahahaha, we could try to create the [wizard-question] tag, but I think toscho will trash that tag immediately. He really doesn't like newly created tags ;-) One thing is very sure, it will be the most used and popular tag on this site

I will kill it with fire.

@toscho just a I feared, there goes a very popular tag ;-)

lol

Little fun on a Friday. Go and check this answer. You can probably try dying.. after the dump. Sorry, but I had to laught, I just hope the answerer did not mean that the OP must die after he took a $h!t, whahaha

lol @PieterGoosen, saw it before but missed the "try dying"

@Sisir, based on a true story :(

@MarkKaplun it was you ! lol

too many times :)

that is most of us!

What??? People don't like working with WordPress...I'm absolutely shocked.

On the other hand, people like to complain about things and WordPress is good for that. Strangely it gets often chosen for the projects anyways. Personally I'm not getting that contradiction...

One a side note, am I the only one thinking, Helen is looking very good, I have never actually seen her just read things by her or her name.

Developers bitch about everything. Bitchelopers

Unfortunately so true...I don't like it though

So WP might be on top, not because it is the worst, but because it is used a lot.

WP is the IE6 of web CMS right now

IE6 was such a huge improvement everything MS didn't see the point of more development

bugs literaly became standard features

and there were a lot of unexpected bugs to bitch about

like IE6 core can not move fordward because any non trivial change will break things

Yeah there are a number of other CMS' of recent that are architecturally superior... but critical mass is everything. Because people have built their livelihoods around WP, it has almost everything you need to run your business, your project, your insert specification here. That makes it difficult for other systems to gain traction because as bad as WP might be; people flock to it for the aforementioned reasons.

what arcitecturally superior thing is next in mass?

@lkraav, imagination is noy my best quality, but just actually moving to OOP instead of using plugins.

The hook system is just a big bug no one wants to touch

ah no, i was asking about a specific product

on user side, backup and deployment come to mind

like what's next biggest thing that has gained at least some traction

the hook system has its advantages too. is there a tech breakdown article that compares these approaches?

As @userabuser said,because of WP is just good enough right now no one has enough critical mass to explore other thing. Drupal is just more admin oriented and targeted at places with IT department

@lkraav I can't remember all their names, but they've been of recent times; you'd probably know them if you saw them. Here's a new static one: getgrav.org and another recent one: statamic.com and there's OctoberCMS (octobercms.com)

ah yeah, getgrav ive seen before

@lkraav, you can not insert a post from the save_post hook without bringing the end of the world as we know it

isn't that sort of an edge case? well i understand if there's a ton of edge cases that pop up.

Point is, be they static or dynamic or a combination of both; they are all born out of (for the most part) a desire for better architecture. Now whether they succeed or not is another question; though from cursory glance at source you can see they are better than WP from a design perspective.

Have you taken a look at ghost?

with all the rest api craze it sounds like a much better option for that crowd

Not since it came out... It's iterated a bit since then I believe

the thing i wouldnt like the most is the dev momentum dying

@lkraav, one major problem with the hook system is that it is not recursive, so you are right that inserting a post from save_post sounds like an edge case, but with enough plugins around you are more likely that whatever you do on save_post will trigger another plugin that will want to create a post

and since almost anything can trigger a hook, it is just beyond control

There's also craftcms.com, grabaperch.com in my bookmarks

sypmhony is the top dog framework as i understand it... so things that build on it, are probably "worthy"

as long as there is money to be made developers will be interested. IMHO the low rates for WP job is a bigger threat

ive been thinking about the static generator approach

it definitely has some real world advantages but until ive built an actual production site on one... i cant evaluate the drawbacks properly

I think matt was right about static being useless. Today you just put varnish in-front of your site

Static has it's use-cases but I think that most of the new static CMS that come out is possibly "I can't be fked designing a proper schema"

processwire.com and bolt.cm are gaining popularity recently at least among German devs

there we are... bolt!

well yeah, germany is a world on its own

lots of weird things have gained enough traction there

getkirby.com

that was the other one on tip of tongue... processwire not heard of but looks interesting

yeah kirby too

also dropplets.com

There's a couple of others though... I can't think of them right now

all names I never heard.... just shows I am not on twitter :)

@userabuser This is a pretty extensive list: github.com/ahadb/flat-file-cms

While I do get a lot of resources from Twitter, most of my bookmarks are composed from scraping github

I guess leaving frameworks aside, is there anything the others are briliant at? At the end wp started as blogging and expanded, I don't believe any system can out of the bos give a good answer to everything

@kraftner nice!

I've not used any others at large; again critical mass problem with WP...

yeh

If the solution doesn't fit WP; I take it to Laravel.

So everything else falls by the wayside

One benefit of the Symphony based systems: you can sell your plugins to the users of almost all the other systems

I've done a site with Kirby and I love the fact that you can easily create structured data with YAML files as well as all data is in files. Makes merging and moving data very easy. Probably doesn't scale but is awesome for small business sites that only change from time to time

ah yes, Laravel i've heard randomly way more than anything else

btw this sums nicely ryan's call for feedback - twitter.com/JohnONolan/status/710677924328779776

Yup that was a good chuckle...

It's true... SO report comes out, WP community melts down "how can we fix this? yadda yadda"... well... here we go.

obviously it had not melted last year and unlikely to met this year as well

Don't worry, the WordPress code quality will be forgotten next week when the next drama is raising up.

LOL

mental melt, not actual.

lol

The perception of WP out of core circle is as a piece of worthless junk. If you follow /. the article about the latest plugin security issue was full of comment negative to wordpress itself with no one even trying to defend it

that is part of why I compare to IE6.... The question is when developers will stop wanting to work with it

when and if the money dries up...

well whatever wp core is or isnt, i do see people making solid iterative efforts to clean it up with every release

Serious, unknown contender for WP... will be Laravel. You just don't know it yet.

i dont think its hopeless for the system to eventually catch to modernity

There is a mailing list Escape the WordPress bubble. It's dead.

Just their line »Love beautiful code? We do too. The PHP Framework For Web Artisans.« makes Lavarel actually sound like the natural adversary.

the problem with framework in this context, is that no one can install and show anything out of the box to a client

@toscho Of course :D Or maybe they escaped and do not longer need to discuss about it..

lol @ialocin

Laravel isn't a CMS. Comparing it with WP doesn't make any sense.

Ah but you don't see the bigger picture my friend... :)

it is my age, eyesight getting worse :)

@MarkKaplun the shell of the bubble is blocking your view :)

LOL

Laravel is undoubtedly the most popular PHP framework, now. It has probably the largest active community along with the most community developed packages. It also has first class extensions/services that Taylor is building on-top. In addition to that people have built ecommerce platforms and CMS' on Larvael. Overtime, you will see more and more of this happen to the point where it becomes easy to implement out the box solutions. That will be the birth of a true competitor.

It's a framework sure; but the implementations built upon it are coming hard and strong especially if you follow the community.

well, e-commerce is a damn hard problem

when will a laravel e-commerce module reach woocommerce level (or further)?

not in a near future. I remember how many years it took woo to start with it, and in the end they just bought someone else's code

although now there are examples to follow so might be easier

It'd be sooner than you think...

because the future is now

and now...

i could use a membership platform, e-commerce, subsription service platform on top of laravel

are any of the modules available just beginner hack level or any mature serious production systems yet?

googling around already, too

plenty of mature packages for Laravel... a lot actually.

what's up with not being able to find laravel package directory link from their home page

instant credibility drop

from the business point of view, is there any money in developing those modules, or they are not there yet?

yeah. same thinking here. if there's not a commercial marketplace, it wont get far.

@lkraav the only official association Laravel has is with Laracasts and it's first class services, Envoyer, Forge and soon to be Spark (commerce/SaaS stuff)

Actually the future is now isn't a logically true statement. So I kind of regret saying it, just because it was fitting. I don't want to perpetuate something wrong. Should be something like, now was the future.

packalyst.com is an unoffocial directory.

In that case, I will reiterate something a firefox developer said about chrome long time a go - "it is easyier to be faster when you don't implement all the required features"

@MarkKaplun yeah there would be...

with all due respect to laravel, at this point it seems to me that it should be easier to fork WP then to start over

it would indeed be interesting to see what a wp fork would be like that said "fuck backwards compatibility"

php7 only and whatever plugins can accommodate, those are the ones supported

of course the auto-updates and all other things of real convenience and time/money save... infrastructure replication is going to be hard

yes

I'd just build WP on top of a proper framework; that to me is the easiest route.

fuck backward compatability and options not decision is the fork I see in my dreams :)

do a wine for wordpress :)

@MarkKaplun: "options not decisions" depends on your funding level. with a billion dollars, sure. anything less, not realistic.

why?

disabling xml-rpc should be in core

are you ready to support all of the problem branches developing out of each option consequence branch?

the option cross-interaction problem support is the single reason why decisions, not options

nobody has the money to support all of the problems

you still have to support them now as the filters to disable them are official

the real question is, who is crazy enough to actually do a fork of WP

actually, me, but I am too lazy

:)

do you have an army behind you? single person fork is doomed to fail from the start. perhaps useful as a personal growth / teaching tool, and input to something bigger.

The thing is that the only thing WP has over other solutions now is the ecosystem. If you radically break backwards compat and rebuild everything that isn't state of the art (so almost everything) you loose 95% of the ecosystem. And then there is no point in having any relation to WP at all. Better start completely from scratch.

@MarkKaplun haha forgot about the effort needed...craziness I have a lot too :)

I actually have given it a thought and there is a posibility of soft fork. Think of all the linux versions out there

options not decisions is actually easy to do

off topic: does woocommerce have something built in to disable "custom attribute" option for variations? i want to force attributes by taxonomy or nothing at all.

Yeah but that works because linux architecture is modular from the very base. So you can replace things bit by bit. WP is monolithic.

just get it as a mu plugin in the instalation

lets not make WP worse then it is, there is a lot of modularity in the system

how else could you better structure meta data/ meta tables?

e.g. storing everything as strings is very inefficient

Off topic: anyone else noticed that the pseudo-markdown support in the editor has borked shortcode attributes with an underscore....

WP has pseudo-markdown support? you mean via jetpack?

oh 4.3

@userabuser yup

must have missed that memo...

Are all options really autoloaded?

yes

well unless saved with autoload=false

yes

Hmm, I had no idea

with object caching, not an issue

i found out i truly lived in the dark until i understood object caching

Say you have a CPT and you need a static front page for said archive ( so the user can edit content above your posts, maybe a page banner, archive title, etc ). How would you go about implementing that?

quite hacky but easy: create a page with the same slug, leave it as draft, query page content on top of archive template

a bit cleaner: add a custom option page for the CPT with an editor. save this as an option. not autoloaded ;)

or if you do not care about a url prefix just create a root item of the CPT and put everything below

and none of these is really nice and clean :)

yeah, this is a sucky problem

wordpress.org/plugins/post-type-archive-descriptions

is something for dropin style

but you can also filter in a page specific query via get_the_archive_description filter

get_page_by_path is a nice function to query by sensible slug

so i have a page tree with "Partials" or "Views" with subpage list: "post-type-archive-description-product" etc

Too many post type plugins. I already have to use Post Type Archive Links for my nav menus :/

then the code also makes sense: $page = get_page_by_path( "views/post-type-archive-description" . get_post_type() )

nice. bookmarked.

regarding autoloading, wp.com autoloads all options. They tested the performance and there isn't any difference. Ofcourse they probably have better behaving plugins

IDK I just wanted to make sure there are still a ton of ways to do post type static pages - some people still disagree though

@Howdy_McGee if you write a question on main I have an answer for you :) it does not fit chat

That may not be a bad idea but I feel like there would be a ton of answers as there's multiple different ways to do it. Would it fit on this question? wordpress.stackexchange.com/q/220897/7355

If it doesn't fit on that question I could ask one that's more speicifc

I think one of my favorite ways so far is to add a new option to Settings -> Reading, then use JQuery to place it under the Blog / Frontpage section so it's nice and grouped. Save the ID into options so it's "assigned" to that post type.

Yep, there are tons of ways and I myself did this sort of things in different ways in the past. but since WP 4.2 there's a simple but nice way to do it. AD the question, I don't think it fits.

kk lemme write something up. One second!

But I think this wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/182015/… could

That looks like a solid candidate

If you answer that one it'll give attention to the new user too - maybe upvotes -> rep -> contributing :D

answering :)

@iantsch if you're saving that type of data as options, and suppose you do prevent it from autoloading when it's not necessary, you're still duplicating data that's already saved in the posts table. Multiply the fields you may need ( title, description, page banner, etc. ) * Number of posts types and you end up having a slew of unnecessary options when you could just query the page itself to grab it's content and metadata on the archive page whenever it's needed.

@Howdy_McGee I do not use a page/post... just the options, and I autoload them.

By creating a settings page?

yes as a submenu for the CPT

additionally you can make a "default settings" page and only save options if needed…

Gotcha. That makes more sense. Then you're autoloading this data onto pages where it's not needed though.

yes but as @MarkKaplun stated, autoloading a few options does not hinder performance

Sure but pulling a page into the archive via a query is equally negligible and supplies more flexibility when it comes to page customization options.

why more flexibility? you store meta data in post_meta and options in options so if you add custom fields you have to load meta_data on top of your redundant post query.

that means query archive post, its meta data and custom query... if you do it with options... main query and autoloaded options.

If you add custom metaboxes onto the page maybe for some meaningless additional content columns specific to the pages or allow the user to update page banners through the featured image box - you then have to create that functionality on the pages and then again into options. That gives you 5 options ( title, description, 2 columns, featured image ) that you are both saving and autoloading on every. single. page. even when not necessary

multiply that by 4 or 5 post types or that by 3 or 4 more custom fields and it quickly gets out of hand

you can serialize the data into an array and do not autoload, if you are worried.

i mean... put in an array and serialize the data. :)

I think you two getting into too much performance discussion ;) anything that has to be that performant will use a page cache

true that :)

but saving db requests is more useful than save options… every request is a bottleneck.

I havn't really followed the discussion.... it is true in principal but if it is something that if done only once, then unless you are wp.com you not going to care

grr most likely I misunderstood you @iantsch

From my perspective, it seems like additional work for something that's already built-in.

ok guys, lets move to more important issues, to SSL the whole site, or just for users?

:)

@Howdy_McGee mine is built in too. and if you code long enough, you got your snippets for custom options right around the corner. if you want we can make up a performance battle ;)

I think in the end the performance gain if there is one is going to be next to nothing.

Any performance you may gain on that archive page you'll lose on normal pages since it's loading that data either way.

Again, I doubt either of which would be noticeable from a load standpoint but the time to put in to create the option pages isn't worth the negligible overhead you gain.

we will never know… until we test it ;)

and aside the featured image, you need to build custom fields (with UX) yourself or use a plugin. In the end you can definitely build a plugin for an option based version once and safe time later.

You could - but I just don't see the pros of that out-weighing the cons.

@gmazzap I'm curious to what gmazzap has to say on the topic - he says there's a easier way than both ours to do it :o

here you are wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/221099/35541

flexibility, reusability, core methods

Now that's cool

Using that method though you're still running an extra query to get the page data. Do you think it would be easier to use get_post_field() instead?

Do you mean get_post_field() to get post content?

that won't work

That and the title

I suppose you're already needing to get the posts with that specific template anyway so the postdata is already at hand in object form.

there's no extra query for title and content

and get_post_field() does not trigger the fields you expect

for example, it does not trigger the_content

that renders shortcodes

the only extra query is to get posts frm post meta

but if you need extra data, you need an additiona query anyway

and considering you have access to custom fields, that open to a lot of possibilitites you don't have using options ot theme options or whatever

Right that pretty much automates a process I've been having to recreate for each post type anyway

yes

@gmazzap I like this and I didn't know about this filter. And if you use the_archive_title and the_archive_description you don't even need to touch the templates:wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/221106/47733 I think I've found my final solution to this. Thx!

@Howdy_McGee Thanks for the cleanup and hint about functions from @gmazzap !

haha np - I kept looking for that function in the codex then remembered.

well that is probably called tunnel vision what I did there coming from the other answer...

@gmazzap great solution!

@gmazzap yeah thanks for showing that filter