Woothemes: paying more and having less

This could be a funny story ?

Early this year, I decided to subscribe on the Woothemes package: around 125 wordpress themes ready to be installed on your website!

It was quite a good decision as some weeks later, Woothemes decided to raise their monthly fee. The motivation was they were providing about 3 new themes per month, reaching a total of more than 125 themes… and the price didn’t change over the last year.

But… some weeks later a new post on their blog announced some more news ?!

125 themes was too much and some of them were now becoming old fashioned… So the Woo Ninjas decided to remove about 25 “old” themes from their catalog. And moreover the team decided they would deliver less new themes… Only 1 or 2 per month.

To make it short… The WooTeam raised their prices and then decided they would work less ?

And this week, the whole woothemes.com website was shutdown, after an DoS attack ?

But technically, I’m reading about data loss and their team working hard to move their system on a new and better hosting.

Currently the main website is still down and I wonder what kind of bad surprises are awaiting for the next months…

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ?

 

jQuery is too big ?

jQuery 1.7 is now available and also jQuey Mobile 1.0

jQuery adds several new features and also tries to keep old API available as long as possible.
As a result, the code size is growing: +220KB uncompressed and +30KB minified and gzipped!
The development team announced some optimization to remove unsed code for the next version.

Beside, a fork project has been annoucing working on a more modular delivery for jQuery library.
The jQuip (jQuery In Parts) project can be followed and modules downloaded here:

https://github.com/mythz/jquip

Core features of jQuery (80%) would be available in a “less than 5KB” javascript library!

That sounds great!

WordPress is too fat

Some years ago, WP could run with less than 8MB.
By now, it is recommended to find a host providing more than 32MB and better is 64MB…

Recently, I just discovered some NoSQL framework, like Fat Free FrameWork with MongoDB.
And some article just compare the RAM footprint between WP and other framework…

http://www.laurencegellert.com/2011/06/memory-usage-in-php-frameworks/

No surprise, WP requires about 20-30MB depending on the plugins and themes activated.

WP is growing fat like Windows OS years before…
The more web host provide memory for PHP, the more WP is eating this memory ?
The problem is obvious when you look at the ratio between the memory usage compared with the size of the content produced at the end.
A web page is about 100KB in HTML, the same for CSS and JavaScript.
Images are between 100KB up to 1MB.
Only Videos are requiring more than 1MB and PHP just don’t handle videos streaming very well
(…PHP xmoov tries to provide some solution)

When most of websites built with WP contains less than 100 pages of user generated content; if you count 100KB per page, it would require about 10MB to load in memory 100 web pages at each request.

So why bothering to add a MySQL layer if it consumes more memory than loading the whole content ?
And is it so necessary to use 30MB to handle a content of 10MB ?

WP would really need an optimized, lightweight edition.

HTML5 is too young

HTML5 Video is a very expected feature. No more Flash player, easy customization by CSS, …

But the web servers still need to upgrade to provide http-streaming features.

Hopefully, the recent versions of Nginx now include the http_ mp4 module!

When will Apache provide the equivalent module ?

Http pseudo-streaming provides better features than pure streaming.

The use of a local buffer is only a problem for copy control. Pure streaming protocols like rtmp provided a way to block offline recording from the buffer.

Live streaming is also missing with video tags for HTML5. The only current way seems to provide chunks of video by JavaScript events ?

Steve Heffernan: HTML5 Video for WordPress

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LAMP is too old

Very interesting video about Drupal and WordPress history, but also visions from these popular CMS creators.

But these two CMS are build on the current standard LAMP architecture.
And MySQL is really too inefficient for 99% of websites build with Drupal or WordPress.
The next step is to get rid of the MySQL database layer.
One great alternative would be to use simple PHP serialization and flat cache files.
This would be the LAPtoP web architecture: Linux Apache Php to Php.

Open Source Discussion with the Founders of Drupal and WordPress

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WordPress is now leading Cms solutions

In 8 years, WP changed from a blogging application to a CMS solution widely used over the web.

After many years

It’s now about 6 years I’ve started using building websites with WordPress.org, the open-source version for WP. And I never really see the interest of having a WordPress.com blog with the Micro Web Agency name…

But why not ?

The official website for my web activity is still http://microwebagency.com/, but surely there will be some added value to write posts on the WordPress.com platform as well ?