I've seen people suggesting that the problems with PHP should be viewed of a case of an internet-critical foundation receiving very little financial support from its users, and normally I'd consider that compelling, but honestly I'd much rather spend money to get the PHP removed from my servers than spend money to keep PHP itself maintained
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@mcc idk. the main problem there is that stuff that's been written in php (and there's a lot of it) has generally been around long enough to fix a lot of the big nasty business logic and authorisation flaws, and redoing that work in a new language is probably several orders of magnitude more effort than just making the php engine itself not broken.
@gsuberland Fortunately for me I began the process of trying to phase out PHP on my servers around 2008. I did this *because I foresaw exactly a problem such as the one we had today*. So WordPress is my only blocker on apt remove php
@mcc ok yeah wordpress is its own fresh hell, and I think it would be fair to consider its security awfulness a separate matter to php (except in this one very specific case I suppose)
Is Wordpress still managed by Matt M and his goblin retinue?
@mcc If the PHP you're talking about is wordpress, yes, I get that.
But I like actual, modern, competent PHP very much.
@kboyd Well, I'm talking about WordPress. If I can get rid of WordPress I can wipe PHP from my systems altogether, and if I can I will.
@mcc Hmm. Hmmmmmmmm. I'm curious about this, but I don't want to bother you with questions. Let me know if I can pry or if I should, like, get back to work or something. :)
@kboyd You can bother me with questions, but if you're trying to convince me to take another look at PHP, it won't work. I did PHP development both personally and professionally between 2004 and 2008 and my decision to phase it out of my systems and not touch it again was careful, principled and I am not interested in arguments I should reverse it.
I actually would be interested in contracting someone to configure a SSG replacement for my WordPress site. I would have done it myself by now but I'm kind of busy because at the same time I want to replace WordPress I also want to replace GMail and also GBoard and also Google Translate and also Google Maps and also Linux and also
@mcc im dying for us to start having small community programming shops where you can go commission stuff that would take just long enough to figure out that its not worth it for most people. especially when you consider that most ppl want the same things so you could just have a cottage industry of customizing/modifying the same underlying principles for individuals
@mcc which site? mermaid.industries? I could definitely turn that into a Golda (anti-AI, de-crappified Hugo fork) site that you could update by creating and editing Markdown files.
@ryanprior mermaid.industries is 11ty :)
the specific site i want converted is https://runhello.com / https://msm.runhello.com (same site, two frontends with different landing pages). As you may notice, it is now returning 501s. Because I disabled it. Because PHP.
@mcc ah. So if I were going to attempt this on your behalf, my initial plan I'd pitch would be:
1. crawl the site, or get an archive from you
2. turn each page into Markdown. audit for pages that need special care.
3. categorize pages
4. abstract out archetypes and templates, building partials and config files
5. rebuild the site using the inputs, tweak until it's close to the original
6. authoring & deploy flows
7. re-enable dynamic comments (could be a rabbit hole, thus I put it last)
@mcc the problem with replacing any app or service is that there’s never one that does exactly everything you loved the last one for doing. So you end up using at least two apps/sites for each thing you replace, and have to consider which one does the thing you want to do this time the best.
Still totally worth doing of course. I’m happily diversifying the apps and sites I use right now, and will continue until I need another break.
@mcc What format is wordpress in? If it's markdown or orgmode I might be able to do it
@sackofbones WordPress stores its data as a MySQL database.
(There are a number of Wordpress-to-SSG converters already, but I want to keep my existing site design and also if possible archive the comment sections into the new version, which makes this start to look more like a development project and less like turning a key on a tool.)
EDIT: Please do not respond to this thread to recommend me SSGs. I have SSGs I like already. The difficulty is converting WP databases and themes to another format, not locating an SSG.
@mcc how about crawling it and saving the URLs from the crawl?
@whitequark That's an option, but it too is "a development project", and would leave me with a site which is harder to modify than if I can fit into an SSG-shaped box.
Offline wordpress-to-static-site converter plus rsync in a cron job?
@mcc I very much agree as far as I remember PHP was originally intended as a templating language and it sort of growing out of proportion like I deliberately avoid it when setting self hosted stuff up because of both security concerns and the fact that most modern PHP apps