[kevinjohn]

Hello everyone,

I'm Kevinjohn Gallagher, the author of the post.

While I really appreciate all the comments, quite a few folks here have made presumptions that are really wide of the mark.

I love WordPress. I use it for my personal site, and thats not going to change. WordPress is very good at what it does, and Im in no way down on it for that; its just that the needs of my small company is now very different that the options WordPress gives us. There's no real drama there.

What has driven this decision though, is that sites that could/should/have-already been running nicely on WordPress have really been let down by a number of changes in the 3 releases in the last year. We deal with a lot of smaller government and charity websites - which don't pay well - and they simply can't handle the AdminUI changing every 16 weeks. To us techies thats a long time, to your average "Joe Public", thats quite a lot. Given that most of these people have really strict usage requirements (colour blind, no use of mouse, etc) the new WordPress 3.3 AdminUI is shockingly inaccessible.

So much of the change involved in the WordPress product is horribly unmanaged. And thats ok, it's free software. For our small company, this doesn't work for us anymore, so we move on. I wrote the post on my personal website, simply as a marker, to give myself closure more than anything. I'm not really sure how or why thats offended so many of you, but I'm more than happy to talk it through over e-mail ;)

Thanks, Kevinjohn =========

We're a 5 person company, with 2-4 freelancers as needed. We're definitely not some $750k a website agency as someone mentioned. Heck thats more than double our turnover for the year!

[jacques_chester]

> So much of the change involved in the WordPress product is horribly unmanaged.

As the volunteer admin of a small blog network, I cannot agree more.

Having to upgrade whole versions just to get a security fix is terrible practice, but I'm forced to do it.

[joelhaus]

Agreed, my highly customized installs are occasionally broken by the upgrades, so I was really happy find this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hotfix/

However, it's often a band-aid that isn't big enough for the wound.

[ereckers]

I'm looking forward to your followup post. Primarily, what you ended up switching to and if and when you have moved your clients off of WordPress, what their reaction was.

I've found that a primary reason companies start using WordPress is because the administrative console is literally the only one intuitive enough to use for most non-technical users. I see in your post and this comment that part of issues with WP is because of Admin UI changes, but I'd still bet on WPs Admin UI. I'll be curious as to your reaction when the grumbles of your devs are replaced with the grumbles from the people who write the checks.

[nhangen]

Welcome to software. If it isn't changing, it's probably been abandoned.

[slaven]

I hope you're being sarcastic, I'm a techie and I let out a small curse whenever I log into a new WP Admin console.