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Comment by qznc | Hacker News Reader

> We’re using WordPress as the core of our launch platform

I guess it makes sense to stay with PHP and reuse your infrastructure knowledge. Still, I believe Wikipedia is successful despite not because of the WikiMedia software. Wordpress is not exactly the hallmark of software engineering either.

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Keep in mind that they're trying to build a news source, not a platform for news sources.

Choosing a stable, battle-tested platform is important for that scenario.

There are a number of newspapers that use WordPress as their platform. This choice makes sense, from a mission standpoint.

WordPress is battle tested in the same way the Pearl harbor was.

Name the second largest attack on Pearl Harbor

Michael Bay.

Who cares about what is running this project. What matters is that it fits the purpose. And if that is Wordpress at this point in time, fine. I would read a news site written in Cobol if the content is more unbiased and balanced than anything else.

I think the point they were trying to make is that the people who live in the house don't care that the nails are all hammered in with a screwdriver, but the people building it should.

When you are asking users for donations as frequently as Wikipedia does, engineering quality is very important. With better software comes lower resource usage, which means cheaper infrastructure, resulting in lower costs.

Your base assumption then is that a measurable percentage of users could be put off because of the technology stack the platform is using?

It’s not, but PHP is still by far the best option for low cost hosting, low traffic hosting.

At any level above shared hosting it really doesn't matter whether you use PHP or any other popular web stack since you will have to manage the whole thing anyway.

There are cheap shared hosting services that provide other options.

WordPress has been re-written in a Node stack

https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso

That is just an admin console which communicates with Wordpress via its API, the Wordpress core has not been rewritten.

That's a dashboard for managing Wordpress sites, not a rewrite of WordPress (nor is a rewrite like that planned)

Wordpress.com is something different than the Open Source Wordpress(.org) that is installed on one's server.

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