Move Over WordPress, There's A New CMS In Town | Hacker News Reader

Move Over WordPress, There's A New CMS In Town

forbes.com

6 pointsJJColao15 comments

Am I the only one who thinks this is BS? Don't get me wrong, Squarespace is a really strong product and i trust their new version is beautiful et al. But Wordpress is Open Source and even wordpress.com is free. How do they compare at all?

Squarespace is quite possibly the most frustrating CMS platform I've ever attempted to configure in my 10 year career. It is not a threat to Wordpress, or even Weebly for that matter.

That's interesting, how so? I found the complete opposite to be true when using both Wordpress and Squarespace for small business sites like local businesses, entrepreneurs, blogs, portfolios, etc.

Designing for Squarespace is by far the simplest process I've used. It's way ahead of even Shopify, which has been touted as being incredibly easy to design for. I can take 90-95% of a completed PSD design to Squarespace in under an hour. If the design is already chopped up in HTML, even faster. It cut my site development time in half, and my clients prefer the user interface versus Wordpress.

The "Selective Display" section are comparable to Drupal, yet they are much easier to work with.

My frustration with Squarespace's previous version (Version 5) was that it was getting a bit dated and it was a bit closed off, meaning some designs and project were just not possible. Squarespace 6 is solving a lot of this.

Regardless of whether or not it's a threat to WP or Weebly, it's an awesome platform to work with and has many features that are simply amazing.

This isn't likely to kill WordPress. Maybe WordPress.com, but not everybody wants a hosted, limited control site - some want to host it themselves. That's WordPress's strength (maybe the only one) and why places like Tumblr still haven't overtaken it.

From Automattic's perspective, WordPress's strength is that the people who don't want hosted, limited control sites write amazing plugins and themes that the people that do want hosted, limited control site also want.

In short, the OSS ecosystem around WordPress drives Automattic's revenue from WordPress.com

I don't deny that WordPress has a lot going for it, but Automattic's reported $45 million in annual revenue doesn't put it too far ahead of Squarespace.

WordPress's annual revenue is 400% Squarespace's last reported revenue.

Squarespace's last reported revenue was 2010. WordPress's $45 million is projected this year - a two year discrepancy.

According to Wikipedia, Squarespace predates Wordpress by one month (April 2003). So "new" CMS is er kind of a uh load of total linkbait crap.

It's not about when the company was founded, it's about the release of Squarespace 6, which compares favorably to WordPress.com's current incarnation.

...except on price and on the broad software ecosphere Auttomatic/WP has (which for the self-hosted option pretty much crushes everyone else unless you are doing a full corporate CMS, where Drupal and Joomla might come into play).

It's a nice proprietary option (maybe even and exceptional one) but the article byline is still very linkbait.

I apologize in advance but I get pretty annoyed at the linkbait accusation. It's a strong, somewhat provocative headline yes, but how is it linkbait? Yes, Squarespace is not currently a competitive alternative to the self-hosting option of Wordpress (which I use everyday), but as you admit it's still an exceptional proprietary option for smaller scale websites. These and a million other nuances don't fit in headlines.

"Provacative" = a pretty good euphemism for "linkbait". "Aggressive SEO" is another.

I am unapologetically from a view where that kind of PT Barnum grade nonsense didn't square well with real journalism. I still cringe at it.

Your title is misleading because "Wordpress" as a general brand encompasses the open source Wordpress.org CMS workhorse, which most of us on HN typically associate with the name. Wordpress.com the cloud blog platform has lots of valid competition, notably Tumblr and Blogger.

I enjoy learning the bootstrapped rags to riches story about Squarespace, but your title frames the story as if its about a new competitor to Wordpress the open source CMS, and it is not.

Point taken.

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