[mgkimsal]

"If it is so awful, why is it on over 25% of sites?"

If McDonalds is so bad for you, why do they serve 550 million Big Macs every year?

WP is 'free', has a low barrier to entry, and for many years non-developers were able to relatively easily add custom functionality (sometimes done well, but often security and performance nightmares).

A lot of people make a lot of money from selling illegal drugs, or fatty foods, or bad investment/insurance products.

WP has its place, and in the right skilled hands, for the right projects, addresses many business needs decently well. Until it doesn't.

But this "right tool for the right job" argument has been beaten to death when it comes to WP. Biggest 'meta' issue I see with WP is that it doesn't do much to encourage most people "developing" on it to ever consider other tools; they just learn to fit more and more jobs in to the same ecosystem, whether it's a good fit or not. And due to the size of the ecosystem, it has enough gravity to keep attracting people to it.

[chiefalchemist]

> "I see with WP is that it doesn't do mauch to encourage most people "developing" on it to ever consider other tools; they just learn to fit more and more jobs in to the same ecosystem, whether it's a good fit or not."

Spot on. I do a fair amount of WP work. I'm a member of a number of WP groups on FB. I see this all the time. For most people WP is a hammer and everything is a nail.

Unfortunately, that's the Kool Aid served by Matt M all the way down. WP isn't an OSS application. It's a cult.

To the majority of the cult members there's nothing else. They know nothing other than WP. Truth be told, most of them don't even know WP.

[abritinthebay]

> If McDonalds is so bad for you, why do they serve 550 million Big Macs every year?

This is an amazingly good comparison because in both cases the initial assumption is wrong.

Just like WP, McDonalds is not bad for you intrinsically. It’s poor discipline and usage that causes problems.

[mgkimsal]

I might go further a bit because large fast food companies engineer the food to be ... addictive in some capacity. And the WP ecosystem is relatively addictive. "Just one more plugin and these 3 problems will be solved!" Per comment above - I inherited a site with around 60 active plugins. The team before just ... added a plugin for every single problem they encountered. Because... point and click? No experience with any other ways of solving problems?

People who've been raised on fast/processed foods, and may never have actually done any cooking themselves, honestly may not even understand the problems with the food they're eating, or what the alternatives are. Yeah, 'home cooking' is more initially expensive (need some basics tools, place to store ingredients, keep them fresh, etc), and certainly more time up front learning how to cook certain things. But... you know what's in the food you've prepared. And you have knowledge and skills that can serve you for a long time.

[batteryhorse]

To be fair, even if you cook for yourself, you still don't know with 100% certainty unless you grow your own crops and animals. When I buy sausages, I'm not exactly sure what's in it, all I can do is pray and hope for the best.

[mgkimsal]

Was thinking that when I was writing that. yeah, you can't always know, and sometimes, you actually do know that there will be pesticides/chemicals/etc that you can't avoid (even if you grow your own stuff, there's crap in the air/soil/water beyond our direct control). In some sense, that's, at very best, no worse than getting food from anywhere else, but it's problematic.

[scarface74]

There is nothing good for you at McDonalds. Even thier “healthy” options are less healthy and over processed compared to local restaurants.

[k__]

The apples are okay.

[mgkimsal]

the coffee and water and juices aren't too bad either. :)

[scarface74]

Juices are higher in sugar and calories than soda....

[mgkimsal]

but they're not generally 'less healthy' than a glass of juice from a local restaurant.

[user5994461]

A poor comparison. McDonalds is highly variable per location. Just because the one closest to you might be terrible doesn't say anything about the rest of the world.

[mgkimsal]

food, not service. mcdonalds food is about as 'same' as you can get per location around the globe.

[user5994461]

The point being, no it's not.

[naasking]

He said terrible for you, not terrible.

[armandososa]

WP is really extensible. The way hooks and filters work and the way they are used trough the codebase allows you to completely alter and change virtually every aspect of the software. That includes everything from the admin UI to the processing and displaying of content. None of the modern alternatives are remotely as powerful and versatile as WP is.

[mgkimsal]

if you're a developer, or have a development team, loads of options are even more extensible and versatile. and those options would all come with more flexible deployment, testing and scalability options.

if you're not big in to development, you're reliant on a plethora of plugins, and you need to hope that the dozens of plugins you tie together know how to play nicely together. I'd run in to multiple situations where poorly built plugins for plugins were hacked on and then conflicted with other plugins - everyone pointed the finger at someone else. and then the standard support line from a couple vendors (these were plugins with paid support, btw) - "disable 100% of all your plugins, then enable them one by one to see where the problem is". Sweet.

And when I tell people I inherited a wp site with just shy of 60 plugins, few people actually believe me. "I would never do that! I would never built anything with more than 4 (substitute with various numbers representing experience levels of people) plugins - that's all anyone ever needs!"

When it works well, it works well. When it doesn't, it's a bloody nightmare.

[52-6F-62]

Speaking from experience in nation-wide digital media— you're dead spot on.

I have seen sites with 60+ WP plugins enabled. Many outdated, many hacked upon (and poorly, with no documentation). Even the WP instances were modified just slightly and had convoluted build processes that nobody on the current teams could explain (again, with no documentation. Or rather documentation was "TBD" circa 2010).

And all of those WP instances either shared configurations and root style sheets or ran as a multi-site on a single machine with Nginx in front of it only using a mix of Akamai, Cloudflare, and Brightcove to handle some, but not all, non-print media.

The sites were consistently being exploited and having porn uploaded. Issues like that were usually caught quickly enough, but that kind of operation kept the teams busy with patching holes rather than improving performance.

Last I checked their WP sites downloaded 20 Mb of scripts alone on a fresh load, and 6mb thereafter.

Bloody nightmare is right.