I think developers underestimate the ecosystem and community aspects. Software is definitely not a space where "if you build it, they will come". There is better codebases, but no one has held a candle to the ecosystem yet. I believe this is because the core users of WP are not it's developers, the users (admins, agency clients etc) hold a considerably larger stake in typical business engagements.
I have been doing eComm agency work for years and even if the chosen eComm platform does have a CMS, we're very often asked to integrate a wordpress site for the company's marketing/content team to use.
It’s HN. This is where WordPress comes to get bashed :-)
Although - to be fair, I’m not seeing nearly as many anti-WP comments as you’d expect here - most people are being reasonably balanced with their criticisms.
As a long time WP agency owner I agree with a fair number of the comments.
My main beef now with the platform is that there are three fairly distinct types of WordPress in 2024.
1) “Classic” WordPress with no Gutenberg: great for data rich sites where you want many custom post types and taxonomies
2) “Gutenberg” WordPress for rich front end editing
3) “FSE” WordPress for quickly throwing up a one pager or simple brochureware site
I wish WP was a bit more vocal about explaining these types and how they differ. And in fact I think they’re sufficiently distinct that the installation path should be explicit about these types and which to choose.
There are of course endless things that really should be in core and not provided by plugins - it’s sometimes galling to have a team pushing endless changes out to Gutenberg when the underlying software doesn’t have obvious stuff. Page duplication, acf style custom field support, rich seo, sitemaps, better media handling, etc - all of this should just be there without plugins.
But - as said above, it’s easy to snipe and overall I bloody love most of the whole ecosystem :-)
Nah, that’s not how it works. People are also complaining about the quality of Google‘s search results, but has anyone come up with a something that can beat them?
Technically, yes! But practically, Wordpress has such a velocity, it’s mostly impossible to stop at this point. There’s an ecosystem of millions of plugins, themes, entire agencies around Wordpress, that’s something you can’t really solve.
So just because Wordpress sticks around doesn’t mean it’s the superior solution; it just happened to suck less than the competition a decade ago.
People are also complaining about JS/PHP/Python, Excel, JIRA, people-complaining, Windows, Teams, Google, death of RSS, ...
I think it helps some people re-evaluate their decisions, helps products to get some unfiltered feedback, and perhaps motivate entrepreneurs to analyze the market needs. What's there to complain? :)
