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Comment by pell | Hacker News Reader

>No GUI-based CMS not built on PHP can be as flexibly hosted as one that is. PHP is easy and can be secured. And there are no PHP-based competitors for WordPress that are as easy to use.

There have been many attempts in the past. Some offered better performance, security, were easier to use, more lightweight, etc. However they all lacked the ecosystem that WordPress provides. They just didn't have the plugins and themes, the webhosters which optimize for WordPress, the developers and companies which are dedicated to developing for, maintaining and optimizing WordPress sites.

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Right. WordPress is Windows for the Web, basically.

More enjoyable to develop for, IMO, but otherwise the comparison holds.

I would add that other PHP-based projects have had severe maintainability crises, poorer clarity of design, even worse code quality crises (Joomla, for example), major fallings-out and multiple forks (Joomla again).

WordPress got this far in part because it managed inevitable community fallings-out and egos much better. It's totally depressing to see what is happening.

I would go as far as saying that PHP has developed into a very good OOP programming language in the past years (from C with dollar signs to something more Java like). Frameworks like Laravel and their ecosystems are actively using modern PHP and utilising the newest PSR standards.

The issue is how WordPress seems to be stuck in the ways of the mid-2000's. You can be a "senior full stack" developer in the WordPress ecosystem but you'll hit a wall once you start applying for more general PHP roles as everything from the standard coding style to how classes and namespaces are used are worlds apart.

> You can be a "senior full stack" developer in the WordPress ecosystem but you'll hit a wall once you start applying for more general PHP roles as everything from the standard coding style to how classes and namespaces are used are worlds apart.

I once taught someone to make this jump, who was convinced he would never be able to. It is definitely a mindset change but I think a good developer can do it. Especially since these days, class and namespace stuff and Composer dependencies are increasingly common in plugin development.

I love Laravel (especially with Lighthouse) but I think the hooks/actions model in WordPress is underrated in its simplicity and appropriateness for the task.

(I am not a fan of the standard WP coding style, TBH)

100%! I made the journey myself after finally getting an honest feedback of a coding challenge I did for a job application, but I do think that my own background in other languages and frameworks helped.

I do worry about the thousands of people out there that have no other marketable skill than WordPress and are not going to climb out.

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