is anyone working on wp killer?
Open source easy to manage software that can have you blogging in minutes?
Open source easy to manage software that can have you blogging in minutes?
It's used for ecommerce, employee management systems, LMS/education platforms, membership/login sites (affinity groups, etc).
Whether it should be used for those use cases - building on top of something that wasn't really designed to be explicitly supportive of any of those use cases - that's another question.
There will be - and are - dozens of 'wp killers' - ecommerce systems, blogging platforms, etc - that will cover specific use cases. But there won't likely be anything generic/flexible enough like wordpress any time soon. And that's probably an overall good thing, but that's also a different argument to make.
The code quality for many of those themes and plugins is also what a FAANG engineer would describe as “abysmal,” an “affront to the industry,” a “I can’t believe people use this,” a “this should be illegal,” whatever epithet you want. Huge surprise, no backwards compatibility coming to anywhere else, anytime soon.
90% of computer code in this world is crap. Crap that seniors would berate or fire people for. We don’t all live in the FAANG bubble; WordPress sadly is the biggest sign of that. The world runs on crap code built on crap architectures, outside of a few niche companies in a few niche geographies who congregate on a few niche forums (like this one). If you’re in one of them, count your blessings. If you’re not, don’t despair, you’ll be a senior-equivalent on a global level in no time.
The Apple engineers even here on HN who work at Apple, and criticize the mistakes of junior devs or other senior devs, have no clue about the trash that exists in the less important parts of the organization. For many of them, just doing some research on how even Apple accepts atrocities would be quite humbling.
The reason WP was so successful is that, for a significant amount of time. it had VERY BASIC php requirements to run, but first and foremost, its API was very STABLE, allowing the creation of a gigantic plugin ecosystem that were still compatible after a decade, when JOOMLA, Drupal and co kept breaking API all the time, or decided to bump their minimum requirements way too often.
so there can't really be a wordpress killer, if you have specific need, use a more specialized CMS.
API stability is one of the most under-rated feature when it comes to open source projects.
I'd be very happy to hear from folks more familiar with these tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal
WordPress is $5 in a VPS, click a theme, add a few plugins, it’s an insecure mess but it was cheap. Need a designer? A few thousand bucks is cheaper than a programmer.
It’s not the network effects. It’s about doing things cheap and fast, for which WordPress has no parallel.
And no, this is not a problem with capitalism. Every social structure ever devised has done this. Even if you’re McDonalds and you want new marketing pages in 2 weeks for a 1 week campaign, WordPress is fine. What else are you going to do? Build a CI/CD pipeline for a 1 week website?
WordPress is for people who don’t work at FAANG. If this is the best they can do so far, there is no reason to believe they’ll do better next time. And that’s okay - we can’t all be FAANG. FAANG standards would be considered delusional compared to most code out there.
Remember that WordPress is the way it is, and it still has a multi-billion dollar company behind it. This is the best a normal, non-FAANG, billionaire organization could do. Which shows, in my opinion, how much of a bubble the code quality purists actually live in.