Probably not too many. The average WordPress site is run by a small business that doesn’t care the slightest bit about tech industry drama, or what open source even means.
I help out with a sports league who run a couple wordpress sites.
- One, its totally the wrong CMS for how they use it.
- Two, they have almost no ability to diagnose and debug issues themselves. Honestly 80% of the issues that get raised to me are even just solved by clicking "keep plugin automatically updated"
They really just want a CMS that allows them to share announcements, post schedules and where to show up to play.
But it gets the job done, for cheap, and there is a decent community on plugins and themes.
Wordpress was originally popular because of its openness and community right? I wonder if that's still the platform it is.
So, you end up with this scummy feeling every time you install a plugin and discover its pricing.
(asking for someone who has a site using wp+woo. I don't plan to switch us - the switching cost is too high to be worth it - but I do want to have something in my pocket for the future.)
I feel I could battle harden a WP setup with those needs.
Disable most of the admin interface. Just let them access what they need.
Announcements, schedules, and where to play - stored as ACF records on a page/post and displayed with a custom template/loop.
Slim down the admin interface to just CRUD for those items.
As the same for most sites hosted with WP.
I was incredibly disappointed in how the plugin ecosystem is dominated by "freemium" plugins that don't really seem in the spirit of open source. Even Automattic's own jetpack seems nothing more than a connector to a proprietary SaaS.
I still don't understand how the new template system is supposed to work either.
Maybe I'd feel different if I was doing this for a company, but I was doing this for free for a charity with near zero budget.
The only real competition seems to be ghost though, and it doesn't even have a real plugin system. If you want something simple like a event calendar you need to host it entirely separately.
Oh gosh I had to use a blog post to even find documentation on it. It’s basically a pile of hidden legos, for a simple table with columns you have to essentially implement it yourself with a few helper methods to help out. Then there’s the new system based on react because they could that has an entirely separate implementation stack. Also for a simple table you end up implementing all the functions and JSX yourself.
I haven't been doing WordPress for a few years now, but plugin maintenance does take up either money or time.
"Freemium" is how everyone gets the end customer to contribute something if they want something readily off-the-shelf, considering how low the barrier of entry for plugin installation is.
Yes there are a lot of Wordpress installs, a lot of them perhaps never even updated. You can claim those as being loyal to Wordpress but if they just set it up and forget it then there’s probably no real loyalty to Automattic. If you have concerns about just setting up a site on a different platform outside of Automattic for whatever reason, why would you trust it any longer? Those people will move on to another just as easy to install cms. Wordpress hasn’t gotten easier to customize in the last x years since your 3.0 install or whatever.
Easy to install and forget isn’t a Wordpress exclusive idea. It perhaps has a lot of mind share, but this is the 2nd time Matt has taken drastic action. It’s now at historical precedent levels.
To recreate the site in another CMS will cost hundreds of more dollars, at minimum, (probably thousands, realistically) and even then: what CMS are they switching to that's easier to use and has as wide a variety of plugins as WordPress? Because I'm not sure that CMS exists.
So the conclusion is: why switch? WordPress is perfectly fine for these people.