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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I helped a local non-profit launch a WordPress site recently, having not kept up to date on WordPress for about a decade.

If you ignore the security implications, the plugin mechanism is astonishingly productive - I needed some 301 redirects, so I searched the plugin dashboard for "redirect", clicked "install" and instantly had a new control panel for setting custom redirects.

The variety and quality of available themes is even more impressive. I'm beginning to understand why the overall ecosystem is such a powerhouse, especially as a tool to enable technical-but-not-software-engineer people to build and deploy their own complex sites.

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To play the devil's advocate, how fundamentally different is it from searching for a gem that allows some function and copy-pasting some example other than that a non-software engineer can do it?

I know, it caters to different kind users, and libraries are typically meant for code consumption (and show the source code up-front and encourage peer contribution), but there is a similar vector here.

Check out drupal. It offers a lot of flexibility compared to any other cms that I've seen. And ~all modules are open-source and meant to work together, building blocks. Though it's been some years since I've used it, it was at the time.

> other than that a non-software engineer can do it?

That's the entire advantage, surely?

It was a one-click install - I clicked a button in the Wordpress admin panel and I could start using the functionality. No text editor, no SSHing anywhere, everything happened in my browser. Definitely fundamentally different from copy and pasting code or installing a gem.

This is what makes WordPress so hard to compete with.

Its vast ecosystem of plug-ins is essentially a moat against all competitors.

More like a swamp of untrusted code.

To be fair, free WP plugin code is available to the public so you can check it out and see if it's trust worthy or not.

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