this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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[–] jedibob5@lemmy.world 149 points 2 months ago (22 children)

Not as drastic as the headline makes it out to be, or at least so they claim.

“We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction,” the post explained. “We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside,” it noted.

We'll see how that actually works out. Tumblr’s backend has always seemed rather... makeshift, so I'm curious to see how they manage to do that. Given Tumblr’s technical eccentricities, a backend migration could probably do a lot of good for the functionality of the site, if done properly. I have my doubts that WordPress' engineers will be given the time and resources to do a full overhaul/refactor though, so I'm fully expecting even more janky, barely functional code stapling the two systems together.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 67 points 2 months ago (16 children)

WordPress is built on decades of hacky code, probably more so than Tumblr. I would be shocked if this is an improvement.

[–] Goodie@lemmy.world 28 points 2 months ago (2 children)

is it decades of hacky code, or decades of battle tested code?

I haven't touched wordpress in... many years, but I've seen far too many developers look at old code and call it junk... only to break things horrifically when they attempt a rewrite.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Hacky.

Wordpress has a reputation for the most moronic security issues. Especially when it's built on PHP, which has its own reputation for moronic security issues. And that's saying nothing about the quality of plugin developers or plugin code.

I've worked on Wordpress sites, plugins, and themes. That was many years ago now, but I doubt it's changed that much. If anything, it's mostly benefited from improvements to PHP.

[–] fake@sh.itjust.works 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Has to rank as one of the most exploited pieces of software ever.

Definitely be not aided by the fact it's targeting an audience without the skills or knowledge to adequately configure, maintain and monitor it. And the plugin community only makes the vulnerability exposure worse.

Yup. I imagine a lot of users install a lot of plugins they don't actually need, which just expands the attack surface.

[–] webhead@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Kind of the old Windows vs Mac problem though. It gets so many exploits because it is so ridiculously popular. No one is going to bother looking for exploits in shit that no one uses right? I'm sure they've got problems like any project but I'm not convinced they're THAT bad. Not to mention a lot of exploits you see are plugins doing dumb shit, not WP itself.

[–] chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Both honestly. Very spaghetti, but noone can deny that it just works from a user perspective. Would I want to maintain the code? Hell no! Do use it as an end user? Hell yeah!

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Nah, not touching that with a 10' pole. There have been far too many exploits for me to feel comfortable putting any of my important data on it. And it's not just that it's popular, the level of sophistication for these attacks are... alarmingly low.

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's a public site that'll be backed up regularly, what kind of important data would you be putting out publicly?

If it's an e-commerce site, than people's payment info, name, and address. If it has a login, then their login information (which they're most likely reusing elsewhere). Even if it's just a static site, than any data that might be hosted on the same server.

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