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Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

WordPress is probably not the only one but the issue with others is that at some point, you hit a wall with them. It is really hard to beat the ease of setting up WordPress (tons of 1 click hosts), ease of extending functionality (need social share? There is a plugin for that). If you need a blog for a non technical person, you just cannot beat WordPress. The codebase may be ugly but who cares.

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Well, a reason to care about the ugly codebase is that unless you're 100% satisfied with somebody else's theme out of the box, you're going to be tweaking it in a child theme (or a full fork), and wow it's ugly.

But having said that, the ecosystem of WordPress is really hard to beat. The original linked post complains that WordPress won't do Markdown without a plugin, but y'know, so what? Jetpack gives me Markdown and great site statistics without Google Analytics. Out of the box, I get a reasonably solid taxonomy system with per-category RSS feeds, threaded comments with Gravatar support, and an API that lets me publish drafts directly from offline clients (including Ulysses, the writing app I was already using). More plugins give me Akismet anti-spam, microformats, webmentions, and per-post crossposting to Tumblr and Dreamwidth. (And Facebook, Medium, and a dozen other systems, if I chose to use them.) There are a lot of things I don't love about WordPress, but the reality is that it's damn hard to beat its user experience.

I'd love it if something else stepped up to be a modern WordPress, but Jekyll, Hugo, et. al. just aren't it. (They're terrific at some things--I maintain a different site with Lektor, using it for things that WordPress wouldn't actually be very good at--but it's not a blog.) Ghost is the closest attempt I'm aware of, but between their launch and their recent 1.0 release, they refocused on being a platform for "building and running a modern online publication. I can't help but feel there's still a real opportunity out there for "modern WordPress competitor," although I don't know if it's a market opportunity--which is, one suspects, why it remains unfilled.

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> The codebase may be ugly but who cares

Code quality matters indirectly here. Wordpress is known for it's massive number of security flaws. If you don't watch for new versions and update regularly ( and who has time for that ? ) consider yourself hacked

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