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Comment by whatamidoingyo | Hacker News Reader

> But I hate it. Thoroughly.

I had this mindset for years. "It's not real programming. It's for people with no brain", I would tell myself. A lot of other developers share this idea, I think.

However, I currently am in the plan of launching a series of blogs, somewhat related to each other. I figured I'd try out wordpress, just to see what it's like, and also because I plan on having other people working on these blogs.

Whoah! Completely blown away by wordpress and how quickly I can set things up. PHP is quite simple, and the built-in functions are very helpful.

If you plan on just launching some products, learn wordpress. If you want to learn a programming language, go ahead and write the entirety of the code base yourself - that's the only reason I can think of to not use wordpress (for myself).

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I recently was forced to use WP for a site due to third party constraints. It simply wreaks of being a swiss cheese of security vulnerabilities once you start adding plugins - so that would be my main reason for staying away from it for a simpler site. For a more complex site you will wind up with so many plugins you are better off custom since something will definitely break from an update down the road.

My favorite thing was how easy it was to create a simple plugin from where I could inject my own php / html / js/ css at just about any stage of the pipeline, and crazily enough, I tried too many cms that would not allow me to override and direct edit the html on a page. It does win in the "easy to deploy but fully customizable" category, just because of that.

But my thought when using it was sometimes "they made this more complicated and difficult than doing it directly, because they managed to convince people the direct programming was out of reach". But that is how I feel about most frameworks, so I might not be objective on that one. Overall it was faster, but the tradeoff was massive opacity. I recently noticed a tracking pixel on my site and have to figure out which a**hole plugin dev is injecting it, then find a different plugin or write my own. I have always been vanilla for my other sites, so learning to combat other vendors and having an adversarial relationship with my own site really breaks the mental model for me.

WP is still popular as it is for two reasons:

1. You can install it in a toaster. The cheapest hosting service will offer PHP and MySQL. It will run slow, but it will run. It will be easy to install and start working right away.

2. You can train anyone to use it and put content on it in an hour.

WordPress is best viewed as a framework for people who don’t want to touch code. The reason it feels more difficult to ‘do it directly’ is because most WP users really aren’t expected to do so; they’d be using plugins rather than writing their own code.

I completely understand that, but in the real world, you will need to get your hands dirty with a bit of code because no matter how complete, there will be an edge case where you need to jump outside the box.

> It simply wreaks of being a swiss cheese of security vulnerabilities once you start adding plugins

The security industry in WP space is bigger than most open source spaces, comparable with Linux. If you go use plugins with a few hundred installs, yeah, you may end up with security risks. But if you use plugins with a few thousand installs and more or use plugins that are from maintainers who have other plugins with such large amount of installs, you should be safe.

I’ve built my own websites running on NextJS, Django, Rails, Jekyll, and Hugo and it was great as a developer getting exactly what you want. Recently we brought on some marketing people and trying to get things out on a custom Django app was blocking them because of a lack of engineering resources. Their campaigns were delayed and they were getting frustrated. We moved to Wordpress and have setup a vetting process for plugins which they just need 2-3. Marketing can update the website as needed and don’t need engineering time. Most of what they create are forms, blog posts, and pages. So nothing super complex anyways.

As an entrepreneur I see why WordPress has such a large command. Plenty of people who can work on it. If you are nontechnical and use a hosted solution you can create a good enough MVP with all of these plugins. As an engineer everything about it is annoying but it commands 42% of the web so it must be doing something right.

> I had this mindset for years. "It's not real programming. It's for people with no brain", I would tell myself. A lot of other developers share this idea, I think

Yeah. I also had the same mentality until I started interfacing with actual users, site owners and customers and they started telling me that they don't give two sh*ts about the things that we programmers think to be 'important'. They care whether something is easy, cheap, it works and that's it. And they are right - they have actual businesses to run, and their livelihoods depend on it. Then I tried setting up and using a few WP sites - holy crap, that was easy. Even if the coding paradigms in some parts of its code were not 'up to date', it worked like a clock, and it took away all stuff that I had to do manually before. Then with time I understood that the project was not changing those 'not up to date' code inside the codebase to keep backward compatibility - which is critically important for the users (who now included me), and I came to appreciate it. I also did some coding on it and got some users and learned that users really, really, REALLY hate their websites and businesses getting disrupted because some programmer/maintainer thought to update something in a backward compatible way because it was 'better programming'. So now I don't do it either.

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