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Cloudflare doesn't do April fools jokes. In fact, 1.1.1.1 was released on April 1st back in 2018 and now it's one of the most used DNS service in the world.
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8 years later and now I'm getting the 4 1's joke.
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I still don't get it
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I interpreted it back then as just following the tradition of 8.8.8.8, 4.4.4.4, 2.2.2.2
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4 1's == 4/1

could just be a coincidence

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It's a legit April Fools'.

On the initial commit:

> Some content is hidden

> Large Commits have some content hidden by default. Use the searchbox below for content that may be hidden.

This for "a spiritual successor to WordPress".

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Isn't it normal for the initial commit to be large?
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Building plugins across WordPress and Shopify right now — can confirm the ecosystem is the entire moat. The code quality is genuinely terrible, but it doesn't matter because every SaaS tool on earth has a WordPress connector.

The real test for any WordPress replacement: can a non-technical business owner hire someone on Fiverr to customize it in an afternoon? WordPress passes that test. Nothing else does. That's not a technology problem, it's a labor market problem.

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I did that once, employed someone on Fiverr to do a WordPress site. They installed a load of plugins for no reason, made a mess, then gave me my money back. I went back to a static site.

That has been my experience, low barrier to entry, low price, shoddy work. Or hire an agency, pay top dollar for little work.

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I can assure you this is not an April Fools. Cloudflare does not do that. This is a real project.
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I can assure you this is not an April Fools. Cloudflare does not do that.

It should. I miss the days when tech was interesting and fun.

Even Steve Jobs, for all his later-day revisionist hard-assed reputation, enjoyed the occasional Easter egg, inside joke, or April Fool's joke.

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I appreciate a good April Fools joke, I also appreciate CloudFlare's approach of "we're extra serious today, here's some useful stuff for ya"
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There were some years in the 90s and early 2ks that had good april fool's jokes, and that was what bubbled up. Not everyone did, so the novelty also made the "meh" ones seem better. By 2008ish everyone was doing one, and most of them weren't very good. By 2012ish marketing got involved and almost all of them were terrible and unfunny.

It was a nice tradition but, like many things, the scene got too big and corporate. It was a zombie tradition for a while then slowly faded away.

In fact when cloudflare started releasing serious things on 4/1, I found it to be a refreshing subversion of the trope.

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I hated that shit. I'd load Slashdot and there was no real content or it was difficult to find real news amongst all the crap. It's not funny. It's annoying.
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Some of the april fools things can be annoying, but I have a big shrug for there being less real news for a day. Anything important will get through and most days don't have much interesting news anyway.
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I feel bad for you. That's a lot of anger over virtually nothing.
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Would you be annoyed if HN went offline just for the hell of it for a day every year?

But you're right, I was an extremely angry person back then. Many years of therapy and deliberate ongoing work and I'm a radically different man. Thank goodness I got to the other side.

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Would you be annoyed if HN went offline just for the hell of it for a day every year?

No. Not even a little. HN is not food. HN is not water. HN is not my family or my job or in any way vital to my life. It's an amusement. A diversion.

I am not a FOMO victim.

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Hm, you might want to catch up on the Wordpress “open source” drama with WP.com vs .org, WP engine and Matt.
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There's always https://textpattern.com/ which is also as old as Wordpress (older?) and better coded. (See also thttps://textpattern.org/ ).
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It stores plugins as strings in the database, then pulls those strings back and evals them as PHP on requests.

"Better coded" is very much a subjective assessment.

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There might be pie on your face but they stole my line, https://github.com/HatmanStack/kill-wordpress
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I think you need to account for the base rate. There's a lot of WordPress plugin vulnerability disclosures because there's a lot of WordPress plugins and there are enough deployments of the plugins to make searching for those vulnerabilities is worthwhile.

That site warns that WordPress plugins can be abandoned, but that's clearly not a WordPress specific issue. Sure some site could use SSG, but that's a different design.

I certainly don't want to claim WordPress security is good, but I'm not sure that site is measuring anything meaningful.

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Just measured your visit, zing.
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Its impressive work from CF that lots of people in this thread are unsure whether its a joke or not, like a delicately balanced april fools for the hn crowd
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Oh, come on. It must be a joke. They can't be serious with this sloppy thing.
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Lets skip the part where i say "how is it sloppy, can you show me" and you say "just look at it, cmon" and "I say no really i don't know" and you say "do your own research" and i say "I really don't know, I'm don't work this high in the stack, please help me understand".

Instead let's just discuss: how is it sloppy, can you show me?

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wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.

yes you want a global db handle sure ya lets delete all tables woohoo

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> wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.

You've sort of nailed it, but this isn't a bad thing. An alternative for these customers does not exist.

There's another vertical which is organizations that have armies of writers churning out content. Any kind of publisher or advertiser, basically. There is no better CMS for this. Large organizations like NYT, etc chose to write their own.

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>> wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.

> You've sort of nailed it, but this isn't a bad thing. An alternative for these customers does not exist.

Yes! I'm locked into WordPress, which I hate, because it's the only platform that will allow a non-developer to maintain it if I get hit by a bus.

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I started building sites for clients in the late '90's, and quickly made "client can edit their phone number on all pages" a key requirement. Wordpress with a WYSIWYG page builder solves that — it's not the only solution, but it works pretty close to right out of the box.
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Which also allows you to not be on call 24/7.

A decade ago I had to learn and run WordPress for a job. I held my nose up the stink was so bad. But quickly I learned how to manage it and have modern sensible practices around it and I've probably gotten more real value out of it than any other CMS or web framework I've touched. That includes Rails.

Thankfully I don't have to do that anymore, but you can sanely and safely run WordPress today and there's zero shame in it.

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There are options that can be run by anyone, but they're often very constrained in what they can do and show.

Wordpress is solidly in that middle ground where you can do a large amount of customization if someone'll pay for it, and then they can do the day-to-day care and feeding of it.

Everything else has either been much worse in all possible ways (Joomla!) or has been a collection of developer wish-lists unusable by anyone (Drupal).

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yep. we like it because with shopify or other platforms, you run into limitations. with Wordpress I can literally just whip it into whatever shape i want.
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