[henning]

WordPress is proof that clean code doesn't matter. Security doesn't matter. Out of the box performance doesn't matter. At least none of these matter if you are the 800 lb gorilla in the market and everyone else is trying to take a piece out of you.

[MangoCoffee]

>if you are the 800 lb gorilla in the market

but it didn't start out as an 800 lb gorilla. Simply saying it's an 800 lb gorilla in the room is lazy.

[9dev]

No, but there weren’t any good contenders at the time, and Wordpress quickly grew from that cute baby gorilla into the massive beast we have now. We could also say that Google didn’t start as a world-spanning empire of search engine moat. Yet it is now, and it’s hard to build a new search engine unless you’re a multi-trillion dollar company (and it’s hard even for them apparently).

[prmoustache]

> No, but there weren’t any good contenders at the time,

Well yes and no. They were very few good blog focused CMS at the time. A contemporary one that comes to my mind and that actually predate Wordpress was Dotclear (which is still alive and still focusing on blogging). More general CMS like Typo3, Drupal, SPIP, Plone to name only a few open source ones were already around too and much more capable than Wordpress was.

What Wordpress did very well at the beginning, was focusing on one thing: blogging for non technical people. It was a much more limited software but that made it much easier for so much people. And it came exactly during the blog boom and only with time became a more general purpose CMS. But if you had to build a website for your business it was a very bad choice at the time.

Bottom line: making good software is one thing, but timing is everything.

[photomatt]

It's funny because a lot of our growth has come from being one of the early CMSes to be completely W3C / XHTML compliant out of the box, security improvements including our update system give us auto-update numbers better than Android (but not as good as Chrome or iOS), and client-side performance and SEO performance are a huge reason why people choose WP! Some things are in the eye of the beholder.

[nikolay]

The only things that matter are a decent admin UI and the illusion of choice of free plugins - most plugins are useless in 2024 because they have a pro version. When you add up the annual costs of all pro versions, the "free" WordPress (which requires a beefy hosting plan) becomes the most expensive and hardest to keep up publishing system nowadays!

[9dev]

Can’t blame the plugin authors, a freemium Wordpress plugin is about the best possible source of passive income there is. Have a security issue? Take your time, they are coming anyway!

[nikolay]

I blame them as they usually don't know how to price their plugins to get real revenue.

[bboygravity]

From a business perspective the significant part of the website costs are man-hours for setup and maintenance.

Got something to say about how WP compares to others when it comes to man-hours (assuming you can buy any and all plugins you want)? Honest question, because I have no idea about CMS.

[nikolay]

But they overprice and they forget people use multiple plugins, so I use a third-party service that leverages GPL to offer most premium themes and plugins for a low annual fee.

[rafark]

So basically you just want the functionality without paying for it.

> they overprice and they forget people use multiple plugins

People who complain about the prices also forget that a lot of these plugins take months or years to develop. You’re (we’ll not you since you made it clear you don’t pay the devs) literally getting thousands of man hours for like 60 bucks per year.

[nikolay]

I never said that - they need to price adequately. 99% of the plugins are just overpriced junk that's not worth even 1% of what they ask for it.

[rafark]

You said you’re buying from an unauthorized reseller because you don’t want to pay what they ask for. If you don’t agree with their prices that’s totally fine. But then why use their products? You want to use them but you don’t want to pay the developers.

[jesterson]

> clean code doesn't matter. Security doesn't matter. Out of the box performance doesn't matter.

Absolutely so. Those are things for people to play, while the only thing taht matters is value. Does clean code provide value? No. Does security? No either.

[throw5345346]

> WordPress is proof that clean code doesn't matter.

At least it isn't Magento.