| > I know a lot of people dislike PHP and WordPress, but I haven't found _anything_ that comes close to it in terms of sheer extensibility and plugin ecosystem. There's a plugin for pretty much anything you might want to do with a platform. I even moved my personal Jekyll-powered blog to WordPress a few years ago. That's exactly what I dislike about WordPress. Yes, it's extensible, yes, it has a shit ton of plugins, but it's also exactly why it's so unsecure, slow and bloated. People want to do with WordPress things that it _should not be doing_. It's a CMS, but its blog engine roots still show to this day. > My favorite thing about WordPress is that it's a known quantity. There's an easy to follow tutorial teaching you pretty much anything you might want to do with the software. PHP isn't the prettiest language, and WordPress itself feels a bit creaky at times. But it's a practical tool. It does the job, and does it very well. It's a very decent blog or simple presentational site engine, but as soon as you stray too far from its base functionality, you end up stuck with shit plugins that break every couple of updates. Their biggest multi-lingual plugin (WPML) slows down every request by a full second just by turning on the plugin. Yeah, you can optimize some settings and gain some of it back, but almost nobody does. Access to tutorials is nice, but the vast majority of them are actually garbage and filled with bad practices. > Since I'm a JavaScript developer, I was optimistic about Ghost becoming a viable alternative to WordPress. Sadly, Ghost's plugin API still doesn't seem to be complete. Without that, it can't replace WordPress for anything besides basic blogging. That seems to be the niche the Ghost developers are interested in, though, so I don't think it's coming anytime soon. The thing is, people want a new WordPress. But a new "CMS that does everything" is bound to have the same issues : being tolerable at most things, but not very good at anything. Disclaimer : I worked at a web agency for some time where half the sites were WP. People want things done with WordPress because they know the admin panel, then get surprised when their site ends up being a huge bloated hack that holds together with duct tape. Oh, and Jesus Christ does it get hit by bots all the freaking time... |