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Comment by bastard_op | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised anyone still uses wordpress after this whole sh!tshow, but outside HN folks probably don't even know. Just reading about it about it puts me off from the product and company.

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If I had to stop using all the software whose politics I find problematic I would have to earn a living breaking rocks.

Deciding to not use Wordpress isn’t that hard though

I have an amateur website up and running where club members can book an accomodation.

Most other software wants more than the $100 one time payment that some random WordPress plugin demanded (VikBooking.)

...and when your site is hacked, will it have been worth it?

"Some random WordPress plugin" is usually the main entry point. The core has a bad track record, but plugins are worse by far.

Since security isn’t a concern, why not use $100 in AI tokens to build your own solution? Could then market it as a replacement to VikBooking and sell it yourself to other amateur clubs.

Because the problem is more complicated than that.

I'll give the example case from my real life.

My wife and one of my best friends want to start a blog. My wife has some wordpress experience from her last job.

There isn't a big expectation for revenue, this is a hobby project.

At least when I did my 'shopping', a managed wordpress instance as far as cost, was somewhere between 'as cheap as just doing self-maintained custom solution hosted' and 'a little bit more but the extra 3-10$ a month versus my time to actually maintain it' stopped me dead in my tracks of Vibe coding an alternative.

IOW, the 'long tail' of wordpress, is the ecosystem of managed providers that exist where the user (at least as long as they are careful about plugins?) doesn't have to worry about updating the core bits, the provider takes care of that for them and can do it at a volume that makes it palatable.

Actually, for a blog, I'd look at Substack, Beehiiv, & Ghost.

I'd have to look into Beehiiv and Ghost, not familiar with those.

Substack has shifted a bit too much towards 'subscribe-ish' type popups in the last 2ish years for me to trust it as an option; independent niche publishers ideally don't want to risk someone getting confused or driven away by a paywall threat.

A lot of people use Wordpress for multi-user or business sites and there isn't a replacement that will meet their needs that also doesn't require a higher degree of technical knowledge than they have. Any alternative more complex than Wordpress's install or that doesn't have feature parity with Wordpress' plugins is going to be a no-go for most of them.

I don’t think that’s been true for 10 years or more.

yeah, most open source projects arn't run by far white supremacists.

A great typo.

Your ass can talk that's crazy

I would expect that a lot of the decisions to avoid it at this point are more focused on how much they can count on the organisations behind the software to maintain it reliably and without becoming hostile than a moral judgement on their actions, though for many it might be both weighing in.

(OTOH, wordpress has quite a lot of lock-in power, and the risk to a smaller user would seem to be smaller, so I could see why a lot of users decide to stick with it for now).

Mullenweg's troubling politics or the lawsuits against him are far from the main reason people should stop using WordPress. It's only been 2 years since he abused his control over the WordPress plugin infrastructure to wreak havoc among users of hosting providers that he had petty arguments with.

https://web.archive.org/web/20241026031947/http://bullenweg....

It's ironic that this kind of blatant user harm gets brushed off as "political," when many on this forum defending him do so for politics.

Any “tech” person would already have left Wordpress a decade ago, even before all the drama. It’s a slow, bloated, bug ridden, insecure mess.

The company is being kept alive by 1. People who Google “how to set up an online blog/store” and click the first link and 2. Those who are already in too deep and don’t want to make the effort to migrate.

I wonder where you think where all these people would left to? I can think of project or two but it's very short list.

Most folks probabpy use the "render wordpress site to static site" model to avoid the security issues.

Yeah that archives your current site. But how does it replace Wordpress? You need CMS when you need to update your site.

WooCommerce.

Unless you want and can go with Shopify and go all in on their platform, WooCommerce is what you need to host an online store on hosting of your own choosing. Alternatives seem to lack the numbers to tackle issues when something goes wrong without too much downtime.

(WooCommerce being a popular WordPress plugin.)

WC is quite feature rich and has many payment gateways. It's also owned by Automattic and locks things like the richest subscription features behind paid plugins.

At least it's better than ZenCart.

I still have one project running on Wordpress.

It was also the worst absolute time to pull these stunts. Between static site generators, LLMs, and the open internet dying - he couldn't have picked a worse time to do his massive mask reveal power play. Wordpress was on the precipice of irrelevance and he gave it a massive shove.

its also hard to move off of

What makes it hard, these days?

I did plenty of WP back in the day and I agree, historically, but each of the strong answers I had in my mind (db integration, editor, plugins, themes) are weakened substantially by the AI agents' ability to port a working site to a new framework. I totally agree for normal users still but for devs taking jobs on this do you think the barriers to switching have come down in size?

its getting buy-in, especially from people entrenched in their workflows, convincing management and sometimes legal depending on what plugins are being used.

It certainly is. But I won't be recommending it for new projects. Imagine how bad that would make you look.

For a lot of projects it wouldn't make you look bad at all.

Yeah, I'm left-swiping anything that involves working on it, outside of maybe being interested in helping people migrate to anything else. I don't know enough PHP to maintain one anyway, don't like what little of the language I do have exposure to, and want nothing to do with this toxic ecosystem.

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