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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

They don't need to be loyal, they just need to be lazy, lazy enough to not want to learn a new technology and spend money + time switching to it. They won't move on to another CMS, because they don't care about WordPress tech industry drama and they don't know who Matt Mullenweg is. WordPress will continue to work just fine for them and they will continue not caring about an issue that will be forgotten about in a month. The vast, vast majority of people using WordPress think of it as an old, reliable, simple way to make a website, and nothing more.

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I bet they know someone who cares and all a switch takes is “hey I found this other cms just as easy as wordpress to setup and it’s less confusing to manage”. Yes there will be people who will never switch, but there are also people that do the advising to those people. If you’re not technically inclined you probably have someone you keep around that IS technically inclined, no?

In my experience, it's more that a small webdev company runs these sites and the client pays $50-200/month to maintain it, maybe do a little SEO, etc.

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.

Okay you seem pretty cemented in this belief. My belief is that there are plenty of CMSes available. The plugin ecosystem is a side effect of a poorly developed cms, not really a feature. You can abstract a lot of need for plugins by using a CMS that isn’t “just the basics to support a plugin culture”. If you want to lock yourself into wordpress requirements then you’ll never escape it.

I don't disagree with you that there are alternatives, I'm just saying that this requires a level of knowledge, expertise, and desire that the average WordPress user simply doesn't have. WordPress is so old and so entrenched that it will take a really big push to get them to go anywhere - and the recent debacle isn't that big enough of one.

Wordpress itself doesn’t have to be deprecated or removed. It can be around forever, but people should have agency to use something else for new projects.

Which CMS would you recommend?

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