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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

Mullenweg's behavior is poor, yes, but I wonder how much that will affect Wordpress's market presence. The average person who would use the service isn't likely to hear about any of this.

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I've been building websites on WordPress for 15+ years, run a WordPress agency and have many clients who come to us specifically asking for us to use WordPress. I'm seriously considering moving to something else because we use the WP Engine plugin Advanced Custom Fields (pro version) and him pulling the free version from the plugin repo in a hissy fit has made me seriously concerned about the stability of the ecosystem if one guy can do something like that in a fit of pique.

I'm curious what you'd consider moving to. Managed Wix/Squarespace? Ghost, maybe? I honestly haven't dug into that world in many years, I don't know what it looks like these days.

Craft and Wagtail are the two I've heard of as WordPress replacements. In our sector (nonprofits) Drupal has too much of an (mostly undeserved, now) reputation as being very hard to use. I found Craft a bit too convoluted (as I mention in another comment, perhaps just due to unfamiliarity). Interested in Wagtail but that would mean a switch from PHP to Python. Not a deal-breaker but a bit of a hump to get over. Wagtail also used to be a bit too beholden to Torchbox (a UK agency) for my tastes - I think they started the project - but looks like that's shifted a bit in terms of the core team.

At my job one of the sites I work on, a large government agency you have heard of, uses Drupal. And honestly? I like Drupal more than Wordpress as a developer.

But, I will say, Drupal is definitely confusing at first with all its nodes and entities and content types and poor documentation and so on. But on the other hand, it doesn't really force you into anything. You can build almost anything with Drupal, which I think makes it a great CMS.

There is a ... version? distro? "Drupal CMS" that seems to be aimed at being simpler / setup out of the box than regular Drupal.

https://new.drupal.org/drupal-cms

Going to look into it in the next few weeks as a possible alternative.

I quite like Drupal too, but I know that clients find it confusing (or at least they used to the last time I spoke to an ex-Drupal client). We find people find WordPress much easier to reason about intitively, although that might well be familiarity.

Unless you're at a theme chop shop, then you might as well move onto greener pastures. There are so many alternatives now for website control panels like Wagtail, Payload, and Craft CMS.

No, mostly ground-up custom built themes. I've tried Craft and found it pretty convoluted (althought that might just be familiarity), but will be looking at Wagtail. Still hoping that WP can pull out of the tailspin because it's going to be a huge headache to switch.

I'm not as sure about that; products like Wordpress have an amplification effect with their users. The average person who uses Wordpress doesn't just have one Wordpress site; they have dozens to thousands, because they're actually an agency/contracting firm/whatever. Its the same, but opposite, reason why Microsoft can build products that piss off literally every corporate end-user they've got on the whole planet; they aren't selling to corporate end-users, they're selling to people with higher leverage, and they haven't pissed those people off.

He's making the ecosystem generally unstable and there are a lot of businesses that depend on that stability.

The "average person" using this is not some average citizen - they're developers or business folks, and such nonsense as has been going on will not go unnoticed by them. People don't want to build a product on this system and have to wonder whether the plugin they're using will be removed by Automattic or whatnot.

Probably enough to notice, but not in a way that threatens the company to continue operating profitability.

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