[smt88]

> I wonder to what extent that can be attributed to its ubiquity versus its quality

Its quality is astonishingly bad. It was clearly developed by someone who didn't even have a basic understanding of relational databases. Unless something has changed, plugins and themes can run arbitrary PHP on the server.

Anything ubiquitous is going to be hated. I agree. But WordPress is bad from a fundamentals perspective.

[joe_g_young]

I think your response can be said of any application made before now.

[smt88]

There are degrees of bad. All code bases are bad.

But I've been writing web software for 30 years and WordPress is among the worst mainstream applications. It's worse than its PHP competitors at the time, and it's worse than Ghost and many of the competitors that came after it.

You can't just dismiss all criticism of the past because it was the past. Some people wrote worse software than others in the past, just as they do today.

[manuelmoreale]

Personally I’m think a big issue is the insistence of wanting to keep everything as backwards compatible for as long as possible. It becomes a burden. At some point you have to accept to make substantial changes in order to improve the situation but it’s not going to happen in the WP ecosystem because that’s one of their selling points.

[ipaddr]

It shows the code base rarely matters compared to user adoption.

[rurban]

Excuse me. phpwiki did exist before mediawiki and wordpress, and allowed no custom php in plugins and themes. It was all safe. Already 20 years ago.

And as worse is better predicted, all new ones went insecure, with less features, but nicer looking themes.