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Comment by nkuttler | Hacker News Reader

I'm speechless that "phpBB, Drupal, Wordpress" are supposed to be the "great" examples of "high quality PHP".

It's not what is said there. Read again: "The focus of PHP has always been on "getting things done" and the language’s developers still value this goal highly. This practicality has spawned great open-source software such as phpBB, Drupal, Wordpress and various other well known applications that are hosted on millions of servers worldwide" So - "getting things done" have spawned great tools like phpBB, Drupal, Wordpress. They are great, because they address problem for end users and are used by millions. It's not said that they are high quality PHP projects if we look at code level.

The author loses a lot of credibility by calling those three apps "great". If the article is about high quality PHP I'm interested in that, and not the poster children for PHP's popularity. As a user, phpBB is a nightmare to use, as a developer, WordPress is spaghetti code at it's worst.

Edit: What's even worse is that we don't get examples of PHP code that was actually written with proper development procedures from the ground up. I mean, I was genuinely hooked by the headline..

WordPress is great software, even if it isn't written well - from the end user's point of view, it is exceptional.

Until you upgrade a plugin. Whoops, your whole site is broken!

> from the end user's point of view, it is exceptional.

I beg to differ. Disclaimer: I am an ex-drupal-developer, now-ruby-developer working at a startup for managed WordPress hosting.

Many people use WordPress because they know of nothing else. They don't find it good, exceptional or bad: they find nothing of it: it is all they know. They can't compare.

Again many people have severe issues with WordPress, ranging from security-holes, infected code, poorly maintained plugins to, most often, poorly implemented themes and horrible performance.

Then, some, really like it. But those are a minority. I've heard many WordPress-developer and -user utter the same words Dries (after Boris Mann) wrt Drupal has uttered: "This CMS sucks least".

You'll have to dig deep in order to find developers, users and other stakeholders, with the ability to compare it to many other alternatives, and who find it "exceptional". I've yet to meat one; eventhough all our customers are WordPress users.

Hey, I'm a guy who has done projects in several other PHP frameworks (Joomal, Drupal, Zend/Magento/aMember, cake, EE, CI) as well as some work in python/django and who tries, each quarter or so, to at least play with some other languages and frameworks (I've done the rails book tutorials, and tutorials with several of the JS MV-ish frameworks).

If you're working with one of the larger WP-oriented managed hosts, we have the same clients and I have likely worked with your hosting.

So, well, here I am, nice to meet you :).

I agree... most people doing this kind of work don't have a lot of other options to choose from-- it is just what they know. They certainly neither know nor care to learn some other framework. Many of the people in this line of work are selling low or mid end projects to smallish businesses premised on leveraging functionality built by the large WP community.

That said, even though I could do projects in other systems:

I am usually working with agencies/consultancies who _want_ WP because,

it is super easy to find folks who can work with WP on some level,

their clients are familiar with WP,

and it is trivial to meet a bunch of marketing or CMS goals with it.

So while WP doesn't "suck the least" (I know of stuff I like better), it's still a good tool for a lot of reasons that have little to do with the code. For marketing objectives, you're going to have a hard time finding something objectively better for the total cost of ownership (there are, of course, better eCommerce, community forum, and application systems).

And your position self-selects for a particular kind of client... you're probably not seeing the folks who are doing the $10K-100K projects I see, in which the server management isn't farmed out to a hosting company.

Wordpress isn't the prettiest blog engine out there, but once you get its way of doing things, it's remarkably easy to get things done with it without your code devolving into an unmaintainable mess.

A thing doesn't devolve into a state it starts in.

As somebody who has made a living writing WordPress code for a few years I strongly disagree. I know how to get things done with it, but I know that the way of doing things is clumsy. Once you want to do something that's not totally common you have to interact with opaque core code that's a horrid mess and never returns useful error codes for example.

Yes, it's not hard to make trivial stuff, but it's nearly impossible (and certainly a waste of time) to do complex things.

Just nose around the symfony2 source. It's clean, readable, consistent, tested, and works.

I mention Wordpress only as great example of "getting this done" approach of PHP. Never did i mention it as example of "high quality PHP code".

phpBB and Drupal have their problems, but they both improved their code-base alot, moving from legacy PHP software to software that is much more maintainable. The road to "high quality software" is long, but throwing software out of the window instead of slowly improving it is not the right solution either.

Both projects have high numbers of unit-tests and can guarantee backwards compatibility and regression free releases in a much better way than most of the software out there in any company, written in any language.

Acquia is the commercial company behind the development of Drupal, so understandably they're going emphasize Drupal as a great example of PHP ;)

Is _a_ commercial company behind the development. The most important, for sure, but not the only one.

actually, it's examples of "high quality software", I believe. And, problematic and freaking annoying as those can be at times, they also have been, historically, extremely easy software to set up for enabling people to get stuff done.

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