[deltron3030]

The main advantage of Wordpress and what makes it unique is that it‘s a real ecosystem, it scales from normal users, or business users/marketers who operate on a very high level, web designers, down to full stack developers and infrastructure devs, covering the whole business - design - dev continuum.

There‘s like a guaranteed influx of new clients downstream, who start small with a site builder, and get snatched up as clients as they grow.

Other “competing“ solutions just don‘t support a similar continuum in their ecosystems. Either they‘re missing the “normal people DIY level“, like most JS and Jamstack solutions, and/or they miss the lower levels and have proprietary hosting and devops solutions.

Having this continuum or diverse market also means that the‘re many people depending on that ecosystem, trying to increase the influx of new people. Not only to the level they operate on, but also the top non dev level. Normal people who ask experts (devs) for advice get directed towards WP as a result.

It‘s basically self promotional.

[ryanmccullagh]

> There‘s like a guaranteed influx of new clients downstream, who start small with a site builder, and get snatched up as clients as they grow.

I like your point here, can you elaborate?

[stevenicr]

There's also a lot of situations where updates can break custom themes or other custom code. Sometimes it's an old plugin that is left not-updated that causes a break or a hack and the site is broken. Many times these are setup and look nice for the client, by someone who is not maintaining any longer.

Then the site breaks they go online looking for help. This is not always a wordpress fault, sometimes it's a plugin issue for example.

However with the Gutenberg thing being forced in, I expect there will be a lot of broken custom themes and lots of people without backups. If their site is set to auto update core, there may be lots of work in the coming weeks.

I'm glad WP is not abandoned, but again (for the umpteenth time) wish new features were added as plugins and not forced into core. Akismet is added in backend as a plugin for people who want to use it, but it's not running by default during an update (as far as I can remember) for example.

At least automattic had notices in the backend dashboard warning about a new editor coming - not sure the notice warned that it may break some custom things - not that the average client would know that they have a custom thing.

Should be an interesting few weeks ahead.

[deltron3030]

People who outgrow the solutions they‘ve built themselves, and then look for better designs, custom plugins, hosting etc. and fall into the hands of businesses that provide those solutions. And these businesses fall themselves into the hands of other businesses further down the WP food-chain.

The “guarantee“ comes from the growth hacking minded ecosystem. People who set up their own WP businesses read up about it and usually follow the advice they find, what plugins to use, how to FB ads etc.