[wp-hackers] Redactor WYSIWYG Editor for WP

Mon Aug 13 01:02:50 UTC 2012


Actually Bryan,
I'm going to disagree.I've yet to meet a "business person" in a company above the SME level that doesn't know there's a cost to supporting legacy.The difference I usually find is that none of them were prepared for just how fast technology would change, and be deprecated.
One of my largest clients is still using an older version of IE because the cost of rewriting all their VBscript/com modules that feed their BI is astronomical. But aside from that the point is, it actually works. 
> "Security Vulnerabilities."
I hear these all the time, but it ignores a sizeable percentage of smaller-CMS work once you move away from small clients: intranets.

> "additional companies not willing to even work with you"
That doesn't really happen; in fact I'd wager it only happens with small companies, who are small enough to act on some foolish principle, or because they don't have the capacity to fullfil the request as stated. I've never worked at a sizeable agency nor an SI where money couldn't convince them to pitch for the work. I have worked with companies who have turned down work/pitches but I've never seen it on a technicality along the lines of "I have to code for IE7? I have to remember what I did 3 years ago, with only the whole internet to use as a reference, and I only get paid double??". The "23 companies" I mentioned all completed the RFI and wanted to work, they just moaned or wrote such a bad answer that they weren't considered. RFI's are under partial-DNA so excuse the lack of specifics, but one fairly reputable company wrote "What's Netscape?". The RFI question was there to see who would charge them, who would charge them and moan, and who would tell them to upgrade !!


> Also, regardless of their decision to push back the upgrade, it absolutely *will* happen eventually (it has to)
Absolutely AN upgrade will happen, but maybe not THAT upgrade.
I have a large multinational for a client thats going straight from IE6 to IE10 in October.It was going to move to IE7 about 4 years ago (before my time), when they heard the IE8 rumblings, so held off, and no sooner was IE8 about to come out and the rewritten-from-the-ground-up IE9 was in alpha. And it wasn't available for WinXP anyway. Now they're planning the migration from WInXP/IE6 > Win8/IE10.
I have no doubt that upgrade will be painful, and costly, but not as costly as going for WinXP/IE6 > WInXP/IE7 > WinVista/IE7 > WinVista/IE8 > Win7/IE9 > Win8/IE10. Thats a browser or OS upgrade every 18 months for the last 9 years; in a place where migration company wide to a new version of either can take up to 18 months.
Thats something else we geeks and tech lovers fail to grasp. Not every upgrade needs to happen, as long as one does happen eventually.

> Also, if you expect the company to grow, the costs to perform the upgrade are only going to increase. 
Uh no, definitely not. At least, not in a linear fashion.Thats why companies put off changing technology. Although they are deferring the cost, they are also hoping that the 'next' upgrade will remove that cost.Say going from IE6 > IE8. They skipped all the IE7 support calls. Going from WInXP/IE7 to Win7/IE9 skipped Vista entirely. Thats a huge saving :)
Ignoring browsers a sec, imagine a software release where the upgrade introduced a bug. You couldn't rollback once it was applied, but you'd have to wait for another release to fix it.By deferring the upgrade until you've seen if it works in the real world you don't have the cost of upgrading twice that early adopter did.Think of all the people who move to the new version of WordPress only after the 3.x.1 bug fix release comes out :)
I can give a few WordPress examples off list if you'd like to chat. Don't want to derail this topic any further than we already have.

> Then again, not performing the upgrade might just guarantee that the company isn't going to grow now.
Again, thats geek thinking.Looking at the FTSE100 top 10 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTSE_100_Index ) I can speak for a fact about 6 of those companies.Not one of them was within 2 versions of the latest browser or 1 version of the latest operating system when our paths crossed. None of them used Chrome, or Firefox or Safari.Not one of them has not grown an incredible amount in the last 5 years.
Ignoring security vulnerabilities, which I can't speak to, what are the POSITIVES for a company of a particular size to upgrade all it's staff's browsers?Text-shadows? CSS3? responsive design? None of that matters if a website can load and display data.That isn't a good Return on Investment.
I'm not saying that upgrading browsers/os/cms is not a great idea. Ofc course it is, but then I'm presuming everyone here who thinks "thou shalt upgrade" is on the latest version of PHP too, right?
And thats the crux of the issue. We all believe that upgrading is the way forward, and we want our clients and potential clients to do the same or we judge them harshly. But we make the same judgement calls ourselves, and choose to take some upgrades and ignore some of the others. We do cost analysis and risk assessments (though we may not call them that); and we choose to upgrade or CHANGE when we think the return on investment will be big and the risk will be small.
I know I come across as a bit of a "Richard" sometimes, but it did make me laugh that NOT one person at the groundbreakingly wonderful WPUK in Edinburgh last month had upgraded to PHP 5.4 (released 13th June), but everyone who heard that I hadn't upgraded to 3.4 (also released June 13th) told me that I should always upgrade technology ASAP. And thats the problem: we think favourably of browsers, HTML5, responsive something, whatever todays buzzword is, CSS3 and out favourite CMS... we start to treat it with different rules/guidelines than we claim to live by.
Kev

Kevinjohn Gallagher    
+44 (0) 7788 718382 
KevinjohnGallagher at hotmail.com 
http://www.kevinjohngallagher.com 
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinjohngallagher 


> Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2012 17:12:21 -0600
> From: bryan at ibaku.net
> To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
> Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Redactor WYSIWYG Editor for WP
> 
> On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 2:32 PM, Kevinjohn Gallagher
> <kevinjohngallagher at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > The specific company that asked the NS4/6 question had over 50,000 employees ; and was for an intranet CMS RFI.They weighed up the cost of supporting the development in older browsers browsers; versus the cost of upgrading over 50,000 computers (in over 100 languages and 200 countries) and all the support questions it would raise. For every year they supported the older browsers, they saved more money than I'll make in my lifetime.
> > We geeks sometime forget that upgrading, heck CHANGE, has a cost associated with it (time / money / support / training ). Sometimes the cost of doing nothing, is less than the cost of change.
> 
> On the flip side, the business guys often forget that there's a cost
> to maintaining old hardware, available vendors dropping like flies
> leaving the remaining ones the ability to jump up prices, lack of
> flexibility to expand rapidly, exposure to way more serious security
> vulnerabilities, additional companies not willing to even work with
> you (such as the 23 companies mentioned in your situation earlier).
> Those costs are often even higher than the upgrade would be, they are
> way less predictable, and much of it can't even be measured (nor can
> the benefits of performing the upgrade).
> 
> Also, regardless of their decision to push back the upgrade, it
> absolutely *will* happen eventually (it has to), and you've just
> pushed your company back on progress that your competitor now has an
> opening on (i.e. the other guys are hiring 30% less staff because
> their internal support web apps are web 2.0 optimized making them
> several times easier to use and several times easier to train for, and
> obviously several times easier for the developers to write and
> maintain). Also, if you expect the company to grow, the costs to
> perform the upgrade are only going to increase. Then again, not
> performing the upgrade might just guarantee that the company isn't
> going to grow now.
> 
> Maybe it is a good decision though if the company is on the decline
> already though...
> 
> Regards,
> Bryan Petty
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