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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

i don't really know why people are always getting on wordpress's case - i used it back when i did a bit of blogging, and it seemed to work ok for me.

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As a blogging platform it's fantastic. If I wrote a blog, it would probably be my first port of call. The problem IME is when people use it to develop complex websites that have no place being built on WordPress. I've had numerous clients over the years asking us to investigate why their website has been hacked and people are receiving dubious links in emails or finding their website serving SEO blogspam, etc.

You rapidly find an insecure spaghetti mess, that's almost unmaintainable, especially when you find loads of random plugins installed and the previous developers cut corners and started hacking code into the core and the plugins, which of course then breaks stuff when you update any of it. Which you need to do. Often.

> As a blogging platform it's fantastic. If I wrote a blog, it would probably be my first port of call

Why over just using a static site generator?

some pros:

- lots of cheap wordpress hosting out there

- no need to "rebuild" whole site when you publish a new article

- friendlier to non-technical people

- upgrading version is just a click away

of course there are cons too (some are mentioned in the other comments), but for me, I can accept those trade offs

Yeah, it has a decent user experience. The problem is the underlying plugin ecosystem and crusty core. It uses outdated legacy PHP patterns (modern PHP is great, but WordPress doesn't use its power), plugins are often vulnerable, supply chain issues, etc.

Too many core features are relegated to plugins (eg: custom fields, custom post types, email signups, basic analytics, basic SEO features, caching, etc). These plugins introduce security holes, hijack your dashboard to beg you to upgrade to the paid tier, and don’t play well with each other (eg: a custom post type plugin won’t integrate with custom fields because it can’t know which custom fields plugin you’re using).

And the economics of the Wordpress ecosystem mean that there’s no incentive to fix this and bring more of these critical features into Wordpress core.

I also find the templating system unintuitive compared to something like Mustache that gets out of your way.

For these reasons I’m currently working on an open source batteries included CMS with a specific aim on improving the developer experience compared to Wordpress. It’s early days but always interested in other peoples thoughts on Wordpress’s strengths and weaknesses.

I should also say that despite all my criticisms, Wordpress is a monumental achievement, one of the great open source projects, and the world is so so much better for it. Imagine how much worse things would be it something more like Wix or FrontPage had become the default way to get a website online in the Web 2.0 era.

I'm not in the market for a CMS but if I were I'd likely go with https://statamic.com/ if I needed to build something from scratch.

The main factor could be that there is no other successful CMS + web server engine _at that scale_ out there. There's plenty of other options if you have the money or the skills, but both of theses are eternally in low supply.

Abusing a blog engine to make it run small EC sites becomes a cheap and half manageable route. Even for super simple things like a site with a presentation page and a contact form, a wordpress blog is faster to set up, cheaper and more manageable and ultimately more reputable than many solution out there (the "cheaper" part being of course the more critical aspect)

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