[adamors]

The thing is, Wordpress is used by people who don't know and do not want to know what those things are. I dare say, even PHP is mostly used by people who don't know what most of what you wrote is.

I've seen even Magento forum members (Magento being a complex e-commerce solution written on the Zend framework) saying they do not know how to write more than a couple of lines of PHP.

[sgdesign]

I'm not sure I agree about the "do not want to know" part. After 5 minutes with Git I don't see how anyone would want to stick with FTP…

But yeah, the fact that WordPress hosting plays so badly with git is a big part of the reason why I probably won't be using it again.

[egypturnash]

FTP: lots of graphical clients available for all OSs, your host can probably give you a bookmark to drop into one for a Windows client and a Mac client, and if they don't it's pretty easy to make a new bookmark pointing to your server with your login/password. You're done, start uploading stuff!

Git: Hi! Let me teach you about version control! We'll start with the command line version. Also you may have to ask your host to turn on Git access to your files. And the likelyhood of them making it easy for you to just drop one file into a simple graphical Git client is close to zero.

Who in your life is clueless about computers? Imagine you're them.

Which one looks more appealing? Which one looks scary and intimidating and demands that you learn a thousand new things on top of learning all the stuff you'll have to learn to get a website up?

[BellsOnSunday]

@pornelski:

> They say git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.

[alxhill]

> After 5 minutes with Git I don't see how anyone would want to stick with FTP…

You're assuming you're dealing with someone at least a bit technical. To them, FTP is drag and drop, git is either 'hacking' or magic.

[krapp]

To be fair, Git is probably arcane to quite a few 'technical' people as well, and a lot of the people who do use Git probably fall into the set including myself who would be lost beyond the basic 'init, add files, branch, merge, push to remote' stuff.

[ceol]

Yes, the folks using version control of any kind, let alone git, are in the minority.

[tibbon]

I think for basic functionality, we still have a long way to go with Git clients.

There's no reason we can't make a Git client that's as simple to use as FTP, and obscures advanced functionality completely unless a user asks for it. Github's desktop clients still aren't quite this.

I'm sure someone would ask why use Git at all then if you're not going to be branching/merging all the time- but at least then when I (more advanced person) need to come in and fix someone's site, I've got a good place to work from, even if they've always just committed linearly to a single branch.

[Bockit]

I was helping a designer-only friend of mine with the implementation of a basic website theme. After an hour of trying to talk them through how to use the github app (let alone git command line) I gave up and we just used dropbox.

The point being, sadly, I think that we're a ways off before the average non-technical person is comfortable using git.

[krapp]

FTP is a vastly simpler process to accomplish what it does -- transfer files from point A to point B. And if all you would be using Git for is, essentially, pushing the contents of a repository to a remote server, then it can sort of be akin to driving a Lamborghini Murcielago around to the corner store.

[kibibu]

And first you have to build the Murcielago

[btilly]

I have used git. I've accidentally gotten myself into messes that take a lot more learning to undo.

If my goal is the functionality of ftp, I prefer ftp in every way except the security issue. (Which is why I use scp instead.)