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Comment by bobsy | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell WordPress is stuck. Its success is largely down to the number of theme's and plugins it currently has. You can build pretty much any basic functionality by just installing the plugin's for it.

A rewrite would probably benefit the performance and abilities of Wordpress but it would be at the cost of ALL the themes and plugins. The platform would start again from scratch. I don't follow Wordpress too closely but I haven't heard of any one talking about - or having the energy for - such a rewrite.

Would Automattic even allow such a rewrite to go through? It would be a horrible transition for Wordpress.com.

As for alternatives... There are a number of good CMS with a well designed, easy to use admin panel. They aren't popular though, plugins are scarce and support is uncertain. This often makes Wordpress the best choice by default. Which is kinda sad.

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It's massively entrenched because of the network effect of the themes and plugins, no doubt. What will overtake wordpress as a blog/cms platform is something that can allow for a large number of the popular themes and plugins to be dropped in (or converted silently). It probably won't happen, but think of Lotus/Excel, for example (or WordPerfect/Word) - both Lotus and WordPerfect were dominant for a long time. People converted when their data/functionality was easily imported in to MSOffice. It's not a perfect comparison, but I suspect this will be what is needed to get people to migrate from Wordpress.

Even that will be an uphill battle, given how many wordpress installs are one-click installs from control panels, somewhat customized to the specifics of that control panel's paths/security/etc.

But the thing is, many of the major flaws of WordPress are baked into its theme and plugin formats. Much like with Excel, you'll need to match it quirk-for-quirk to interoperate with it. And what's the point of simply reimplementing WordPress?

I think you could probably get away with shooting for something like 70-80% functionality via a wrapper layer around your new APIs. Even Excel and Word aren't 100% compatible between their own versions, and WP is going through a transition period where many older plugins don't work either.

The goal would not be to reimplement all of wordpress, but implement a compatibility layer suitable to emulating enough of the basics to allow some migrations and encourage people to try out something new.

There's dozens of CMS and blogging engines out there, but no one has attempted a WP-emulation layer (as far as I can tell). Although, given it's PHP nature, and direct grabbing of $_GET and $_POST and such, it may simply not be possible at all.

For future reference, plural forms of words don't require apostrophes. (theme's, plugin's)

Dayum Travis,

Harsh, just harsh! :)

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