Feedback on Grist.org Move

My post about Grist.org moving to WordPress received a lot of feedback from the community and a long response and explanation from Matt Perry of Grist (thanks, Matt, for taking the time to join the discussion). Matt wanted to clarify their continued involvement in the community:

We’ve loved being a part offended the EE community over the past few years, and plan on staying active as both EE/CI users and coders—we still have CodeIgniter apps in production. So—if our announcement sounded overly-brusque or dismissive of Ellis Labs or the community in any way, please know that it certainly wasn’t meant that way.

He noted that there were a couple of things that made them move:

• the availability (or not) of highly managed, platform-specific enterprise hosting. EE does not yet have a comparable, truly enterprise-scale hosting solution for media companies in particular (see http:vip.wordpress.com)
• Weaknesses in EE’s caching layer and scaling.

Read the thread to follow the entire discussion. I do, however, want to highlight part of a comment from Aaron Waldon:

To address the main issue about Grist.org moving to WordPress, good for them! At the end of the day, the CMS is a means to an end. If they feel the move will be advantageous, I am glad they are doing so and I genuinely hope it works out well for them.

As a community, we should not be offended when a company switches technologies. After all, it is not a personal attack on EE or its user-base. They didn’t pillage our proverbial village or threaten our livelihood. Not all companies are the same and not all end goals are the same. No big deal.

Agreed.