but what's better alternative aside from rolling your own CMS?
There’s zero reason to use Wordpress in 2024 imo.
Many folk, companies don't have the resources nor skillset to set up a LAMP equivalent for such.
If you want to be the next wonder-host for $CMS be my guest. I recommend Kirby. No database required and only uses text files for its backend.
I’ve used it before, and many clients sites are now dead because their web host didn’t want to support old PHP versions anymore.
Any cloud-based CMS doesn’t have that problem.
That, plus, Kirby just isn’t robust enough to compare to something like Webflow.
Also
“many clients sites are now dead because their web host didn’t want to support old PHP versions anymore”
Isn’t the solution to that as simple as upgrading your CMS?
That fact that you constantly have to upgrade Kirby and pay new licensing fees (and bill your customers for this) because no web host wants to support an old version of PHP...betrays the idea that Kirby is a way out of this. Sure it doesn't have a database to hassle with like Wordpress so it's better in that regard. But it's still objectively worse than any cloud platform.
If you're on a cloud subscription platform you're completely hands off (no upgrades necessary) and the client now has permanent support from said subscription they're paying for. It's fundamentally a better model than dumping websites on clients and letting them slowly rot away while they forget how to do anything with them.
Sure you’re just letting someone else do the job but at a significant higher price. It’s a trade off like everything else. In some situations a cloud solution is probably good. But in other cases it might be way too expensive in the long run. So it’s a balance and every situation is different.
Cost of maintaining, whos going to keep up with latest CVEs?
Cost of domain, registrars, SSL certificates.
Cost of all adds up. A non-tech IT business has minimal resources for all of that. They want "pay $, click, it works". Not a dedicated IT worker to serve all of above.
If you take say a tutor, a bassist, they don't want all that overhead. They want a platform where they can advertise their tutoring costs, a contact form and be done with it. WP isn't ideal but it works.
For someone who can host WAMP/LAMP, fine. But for the average folk, it's not. There was a reason why WP gained popularity to begin with and it was because it was easy to adapt and junior PHP developers were plentiful, just as junior python developers are now.
Yeah and especially if they want to update it themselves. Wordpress makes that easy even for the non techies so the customer can do it themselves.
Of course the big Achilles heel of WordPress is the plugins and their vulnerabilities. So really you still need someone technical to keep it up to date, which is often forgotten.
When it comes to e-commerce, Shopify. Or if open source and control is important to you, Saleor.
the funny thing is, to the vast majority of people that use WP, they won't even care if even know about all of the drama. even people that took some sort of WP bootcamp and earn a living managing other people's WP site probably are blissfully ignorant of this drama.
the people that might have some actual interest are the devs that create the various plugins/templates. but as someone else mentioned, if everything goes nuclear and everyone loses their damn minds, a more sane party can just fork the thing and call it something totally different without using the terms like "word" or "press".
I've actually been pretty happy with Pocketbase, though it really straddles the line of rolling your own CMS. You aren't technically writing the db wrapper or visual editor itself, but any functionality you need beyond authentication is up to you to build.
For those interested in migrating away, I wrote an exporter from WordPress to Grav [2], which, given recent events, I've pulled back out and am updating again.
[1] https://getgrav.org/ [2] https://github.com/jgonyea/wp2grav_exporter
They are good people, but they definitely need more contributors!
What Grav lacks is momentum.
Imo it's easier to just roll a fresh rails project and use any admin gem than to write a custom theme for Wordpress
I cannot believe how much money people are will to pay for blog hosting.