Yep, this is a big reason I pulled all my wife's old blogs out of WP and moved them into static sites. The reduced (removal of, really) threat model alone has been so worth it.

You can impose a structure process around wordpress - version control, more of an OO approach, etc - but you're then somewhat out of step with the rest of the wordpress ecosystem. It becomes harder to use anything from the 'regular' wordpress world, which is part of the (often a prime) reason for its continued popularity; an extremely large ecosystem.

And... the availability of "wordpress developers" hinges on people being able to do the 'fast and loose' thing as needed. I know there are WP devs/agencies that use version control for all their stuff, but it's the opposite of how most people learn and work in wordpress.

> Wordpress however is still a hug pile of garbage. It might be functional and has all the features you'd ever need, but I could never trust it to run even a simple blog.

Same here. I was kind of shocked on HN how man advocate for it.

> Who could ever be productive with something like this?:

The millions of sites running on Wordpress? Wordpress? Facebook?

Maybe Wordpress has outgrown its php legacy, but there are many websites that are far better off writing a bunch of HTML/inline CSS/and a sprinkling of php and JS and getting it out there, as opposed to setting up massive build tool chains and writing React components.

In fact, when that was the norm, line developers were far more productive and building tons of personal and commercial webpages from scratch, building websites, web apps, etc. The developer output and productivity outside of large corporations and organizations seems far lower today than it did a decade+ ago.

Edit: I’m not a PHP developer, but I’m going over that code and it seems eminently readable. Heck, even as a non php developer I can fully understand what it’s trying to do. What exactly is the issue with the code? Is it the fact that the HTML part is written as HTML and not some made up language that tries to look like HTML but then compiles down to JS which then tries to reconstruct the HTML looking like thing back into HTML? Or the fact that i can read much of the code in that single file and don’t have to dig into a build configuration file to figure out where the corresponding JS and CSS files are located?

I’m sure there’s a lot of ways the code can be improved, but this code seems just fine?