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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has been using WordPress since 2006, my brain exploded when I saw this.

WordPress has always been an absolute mess. The basic architecture was insane even in the early 2000s. There is no effective sandbox for plugins or themes, and you can't really make serious use of WordPress without those.

Nowadays, there are so many better applications that accomplish the same thing, and they aren't stuck on a half-baked database schema from 2003, they can be version-controlled, multiple people can work on them at the same time...

WordPress is one of the worst widely used pieces of software on the web. It is a catastrophe.

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> here is no effective sandbox for plugins or themes, and you can't really make serious use of WordPress without those.

I mean, literally thousands of sites do make serious use of WordPress. Quite surprised that in your use of WordPress since 2006 you haven't heard about any of them.

I think the commenter’s point was that making “serious use” of WordPress generally requires also using plugins or theme(s).

What are good alternatives these days that have as much flexibility?

Wagtail [0]

[0] https://wagtail.io/

Wagtail requires tens of hours of development to achieve WordPress's stock functionality, and there are very few plugins.

The CMS space is incredibly crowded. The vast majority of WordPress websites would be cheaper, faster, and more secure if they were just moved to SquareSpace, which has the WordPress features that 99% of sites would need.

For more custom projects, I prefer the headless variety[1] because it makes sense to separate the data and presentation layers. That means you have the full ecosystem and flexibility of HTML/CSS/JS.

Ghost[2] was the first serious competitor I saw years ago. Gatsby is among the most popular these days[3].

But honestly, information sites should just use SquareSpace or something like it. There's no reason to maintain static site infrastructure at this point.

1. https://jamstack.org/

2. https://ghost.org/

3. https://www.gatsbyjs.com/

If we're starting to compare to hosted offers, then hosted WordPress (WP.org or any other managed host that curates access to plugins/themes) surely needs to be added back to the list?

For enterprise level stuff, Drupal. Drupal development is a pain in the ass, but it's incredibly powerful, has a great community, and has a huge focus on security. But for the average blog/site, Drupal is overkill and too technical for what most people need

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