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Comment by lwhi | Hacker News Reader

I really can't understand why an organisation would choose wordpress.

What are the benefits over an enterprise CMS like Drupal 10?

No idea, but after 27 years of web developments (yes I started around 1996) I would choose Wordpress every day and twice on Sundays. I have used Drupal, Joomla and Codeigniter extensively, and yet my answer today is, Wordpress.

I've never really delved into wordpress deeply; but it feels like the ecosystem is fragmented, lacks any standards and is littered with proprietary plugins that are no longer supported by the authors; and create conflicts with other plug-ins on the installation.

Am I incorrect?

Nope. That is why Wordpress wins.

This isn't a very convincing argument.

Because of the fractured plugins that exist for WordPress is what makes WordPress the strongest contender than any other CMS.

Even though they may be security ridden, bug ridden, exploitable leading to an increase of DDoS, Crypto mining, and malware spreading and exploitation there is no other CMS out there that has the sheer amount of plugins that WordPress has.

Wordpress as well has a large pool of developers, designers who you can hire commission for cheap to create your brand compared to any other. Better?

The biggest advantage to Wordpress, from an enterprise perspective, is the huge ecosystem.

Tons of other people use it, which means tons of other people are beta-testing it for you. The WP community runs a competent security program that issues patched regularly.

And tons of people know it inside and out. That makes it easier to hire strong staff, get competitive rates and performance from vendors, and find expert help for hosting, devops, performance tuning, security, etc.

Drupal had all this as well but, sadly, it’s all shrinking. In retrospect D7 was the high point and although they tried to “get off the island” with the massive changes in D8, all they really did was drive away a bunch of believers, while mostly failing to attract new fans.

There’s a level of information architecture complexity where Wordpress starts to suck and Drupal is great. Thanks to changes in WP and Drupal over the past decade, that level has moved way up. Wordpress can do a lot of stuff that D7 could, and D10 can do a lot of even more powerful stuff that few websites actually need.

Why are so many WordPress sites I've seen in such a mess though?

Proprietary plugins, open source plugins, half broken themes, conflicts, security holes ..

These things seem par for the course?

Drupal has a huge ecosystem too, and it's truly open source and built on a solid extensible framework (Symfony). D10 is a completely different beast to D7 .. and actual uses good development practices.

Is WordPress closer technically to the bad days of D7?

Because most people don’t know how to host and maintain web software. Hence the growth of fully hosted platforms like Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Shopify, Etsy, etc.

That’s not really relevant to how enterprises decide on web content management software, though.

The WordPress ecosystem spans the gamut from my-first-site through to massive enterprises, so you’d have to expect that many sites you see are in the long-tail. At the higher end, it’s no different to any professional software ecosystem.

There’s also varied ecosystems within WordPress, as it’s large enough to support many. For example, the DAM integration cited in the article isn’t something you’ll find on many sites, since it’s an enterprise use case; we don’t even list it on the official plugin directory at all. Plugins and libraries used on enterprise sites are basically a separate ecosystem unto themselves.

(I manage the team that maintains said DAM plugin.)

Exactly. Many places I've seen pick wordpress only to realise it isn't working. they go to another agency who recommends them a new website in.. wordpress.

So why exactly isn't it working?

They often get handed a website in wordpress with a bunch of random plug-ins that break during future updates (or require ongoing license payments they didn't anticipate) The plug-ins being a mixture of free and proprietary that can't be easily extended to add features

So how is Drupal different?

Drupal is only open source.

Theres a specific versioned API. Less of a wild west by the sound of it.

> The plug-ins being a mixture of free and proprietary that can't be easily extended to add features

This is not true - while there are paid (“premium”) plugins in the WordPress ecosystem, they are all open source, as they are classified as derivative works of WordPress and hence the GPL virally applies.

There are in fact some plugin resellers who sell bundles of premium plugins under the GPL - it’s frowned upon by the community, but it’s certainly legal. (At least for the copyright; trademarks are a separate story.)

Typically, with paid plugins you’re paying for access to the download system (making updates easy), and for support.

My point is that the client has been given a mixture of plug-ins, some free and some licensed. Not all are designed / architected in a manner to be modified or extended. It can be a mess.

The plugins don't always upgrade easily or work well together in the future.

Wordpress is ok for some situations, I'm not against using it. I've seen enough times where it's been used and another solution Django or Drupal may have been a smarter long term option.

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