Top websites screwed over in WordPress.com super-outage: VIP Go? More like VIP No Go

News websites and other top sites have fallen over, or reverted to 2002-era my-first-blog themes, after their hosting platform, WordPress.com's premium VIP Go service, broke down today. Readers of the UK's Sun and Metro newspapers, and Rolling Stone magazine, online, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, 9to5Mac, 9to5Google, Quartz, …

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Improvement

No ads, no cluttered themes, what better time to visit those sites!

[Ben Tasker]

Re: Improvement

Unfortunately The Sun is one of them, so there's still the content to contend with

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Improvement

It's a feature not a bug?

[swm]

The more connected we become the more vulnerable we become.

And no one knows all the interconnections.

[Anonymous Coward]

People really use WordPress?

Why?

[Bronek Kozicki]

Re: People really use WordPress?

So the rest of us can easily identify lame hack attempts, by means of "grep wp-login\.php"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: People really use WordPress?

Because Sitecore and Kentico are expensive pieces of garbage, and at least the plugin ecosystem of Wordpress is still (relatively) healthy.

[Steve Davies 3]

Oh dear

This sort of reinds me that I really do need to update the version of Wordpress that my blog uses. It must be nearly a year since I last updated it. I think a relase from abour 3 months ago will be pretty solid by now. (sic).

Perhaps next month?

[VinceH]

Re: Oh dear

Unfortunately, when you do you'll be using the awful Gutenberg editor.

[Mage]

Re: awful Gutenberg editor.

No, you can keep on using the old editor and there are choice of plugins.

[VinceH]

Re: awful Gutenberg editor.

I don't think I've seen an option to use the old editor. ISTR when Gutenberg was being trialled there was an option to use the classic editor which, IIRC, was a bit of a fudge, effectively turning a single block into the 'classic' editor, but wasn't as usable.

(Amongst other things, the Gutenberg editor is SLOOOOW on the hardware I normally use - and that fudge was just as slow. It gets tedious typing and then waiting for the words to appear on the screen.)

What I resorted to doing was using a text editor, and typing my posts with mark up in that, then copying and pasting the result into Gutenberg - which is much faster (until I start editing my typos, or adding images, etc). Sometimes I use the code editor, but generally the external text editor covers me - but the point is, if I'm doing that, why do I need to continue with WP? (The answer, of course, is I have a lot of old posts that I'd have to migrate if I moved away.)

[before I submit this comment...]

I've just logged into one of my sites on this computer, and I still can't see an option to use the classic editor.

Installing a classic editor plug in, it looks as though it's as I described above; a fudge by turning a block into the editor - but I won't know until I'm on my slow PC at home whether it's usable or not because of that slow speed.

[caffeine addict]

Wordpress is good for what it's intended for - a small blogging site.

I continue to be bemused by people using it for everything and anything. I can only assume people like TechCrunch and The Sun only use it for their blogs (hohoho) because you can get Wordpress developers cheap. In which case, they deserve everything they get.

[Mage]

Wut?

Why are big companies "outsourcing" this? It's trivial to set up your own copy of Wordpress.

[yoganmahew]

Re: Wut?

Everything, and I do mean everything, is outsourced to the cloud, SaaS providers etc.

Every company wants to be in just the content business, undifferentiated by technology. (Mostly undifferentiated by content, but that's another issue). This is not just publishing companies, this is pretty much anyone, particularly US companies.

[Captain Scarlet]

Re: Wut?

Well the Marketing teams are sold a "dynamic and easy to update website".

[caffeine addict]

Re: Wut?

In Wordpress's case, often by people who shouldn't have the rights to do so...