Category: WordPress development

What MVC framework for web development?

Answered in Quora:

Q: Why should I learn the combination of Python/Django rather than PHP, JS/Node? I am a web designer moving to web development. What is the scope of Python/Django?

Python/Django is like learning Ruby/Ruby on Rails. The equivalent in the PHP world would be PHP/Drupal or PHP/Laravel. Equivalents in NodeJS is not Node/JS but NodeJS/Meteor or NodeJS/Sails. In all those examples above the first part would be the underlying web language, and the second would be a MVC framework on top of the language.

(There exist web frameworks that do not provide MVC but just the web server and HTTP request-response plumbing. This isn’t common in PHP since it is embedded in a web server such as Apache or nginx, but in Python it would be flask and in NodeJS it would be Express or Koa— these are sometimes referred to as “microframeworks.”)

However, unlike on the front-end with things like Vue.js, React/Redux and AngularJS, full-service MVC web frameworks have increasingly less utility on the back-end. This is because most the the advantage a framework provides is to do heavy-lifting of tedious but repeatable tasks that require a lot of code (very common when building a user interface) the bulk of which has been moved onto the client in web development. What value is a MVC’s templating system and router when both have moved into javascript on the client-side and all interactions are through an API? This becomes more extreme with standardization of the data interface (a la GraphQL) and the prevalence of more service-oriented architecture popularized by microservices or serverless FaaS architectures.

MVC web-frameworks still provide things such as a configuration management, a data object model and abstraction, but even those can get in the way as a website becomes more mature and this pre-fab approach becomes a hinderance to future scalability and optimization.

Also, when not building to scale or building proof-of-concept, a full MVC architecture will help you starting out on server-side web development because it does all the heavy lifting for you. So it might be good to start out with one, though YMMV (your mileage my vary).

Continue reading about the state of web frameworks after the jump

Posted on by tychay 0

What’s something very few people know about PHP?

Answered in Quora:

Q: What’s something very few people know about PHP?

It is mind-bogglingly popular for web development. That popularity hasn’t diminished even though conventional wisdom says otherwise…

Over a decade ago, I said about 40% of the top 100 websites use PHP — a number I pulled out of my ass — but nobody (not even the Ruby on Rails developers I pissed off) argued with that spurious claim. In 2009, Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress became curious with my claim and did a survey of Quantcast’s top 100 sites — he got almost exactly 40. Even today, among the 10 most important websites, four use PHP as their language of choice — 40% again.

Overall, almost 80% of the internet is powered by PHP, and that has held steady for years! Newer web languages such as Ruby or NodeJS have only grown at the expense of other languages such as ASP, Java, or Perl.

Just one single application written in PHP, WordPress, is used by over 30% of all websites on the entirety of the internet. That’s more than double the market share since back when I last worked at Automattic/WordPress in 2011! It grew until it saturated its entire market — over 60% of all CMSs. In the CMS market as a whole, PHP-based CMSs occupy positions 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, and 8 in the top 10. The most popular non-PHP-based CMS is both closed source and sitting at only a 2.5% share.

It was estimated back in 2009 that there were 5 million PHP developers worldwide. It’s difficult to make this estimate today, but it’s obvious that that number has also held steady or grown.

These last few years, I’ve been commercially working in Ruby (on Rails), GoLang, NodeJS (for static servers), and Python (Django), but PHP is still also my love in that love/hate relationship.

Come see my talk in February 2019 at SunshinePHP in Florida!

Posted on by tychay 0

Pork Tocino

If you live in The Richmond, you know that B*Star Bar is like eating at Burma Superstar but without the line.

Breakfast plate with pork tocino, garlic fried rice topped with two eggs cooked over easy. Spoon in foreground
Pork Tocino with Garlic Fried Rice
B*Star Bar, The Richmond, San Francisco, California, United States

Sony DSC-RX1
0.013 sec (1/80) @ f/4.5, iso400, 35 mm

My favorite brunch dish there is the Pork Tocino. Grilled jerk pork over a bed of garlic fried rice and cherry tomatoes, topped with scallions and balsamic vinegar.

Since Marie loves their Huevos Racheros, I end up ordering this dish a lot. The only times I don’t is when we bring a guest, then I suggest they get it and I order something else.

Continue reading about some WordPress plugin notes after the jump

Posted on by tychay Image 0

FYWP #257-262: wpautop and shortcodes/oEmbed do not play nice at all

It occurs to me that wpautop() is the register_globals of WordPress—a feature that was instrumental for its growth and popularity, but really needs to DIAF. They should rename the function wppeepee() because it finds a way to pee pee on your content at the most inopportune moments, causing unending headaches in your code.

For those of you who don’t know, wpautop can be seen as nl2br() on steriods, or (as I prefer to call it) a poor man’s Markdown. It’s been in WordPress for almost forever, and it’s hard to imagine writing a blog post without it, even if it’s a Really Bad Idea™.

Continue reading about the interaction of wpautop, shortcodes and oEmbed after the jump

Posted on by tychay 0