[luckylion]

> in some of its microsites

Exactly. That's not a large scale enterprise CMS. WordPress is fine for that.

But if you wanted to do something that requires fine-grained access control, publishing control, audit logs etc, you're not going to use WP, or you're building a CMS on top of WP. I'm doing that all day because I work in an industry that loves WP and everybody knows WP, so it's easy to collaborate. I've built dozens of plugins to accommodate for our various needs because you will hit some hard walls if you scale to large amounts of URLs, and you will run into problems with the code quality in popular plugins when you're going beyond "I just want it to look nice and work okay".

I don't hate WP. I'd consider myself a WP veteran, I've worked a lot with WP over the years, I've contributed code to core, I've found various bugs. I wouldn't ever consider it for anything that I'd call "enterprise" or "large". It's like when somebody talks about building an enterprise data management system and then says "the fact that the inventor of the CSV format liked pineapple of pizza will make sure that I won't consider CSV as the data store for my system". If they considered CSV before finding that out, they really shouldn't be making decisions in that type of project.

[partiallypro]

I guess I don't really understand what you consider "large" or "enterprise" there are very large sites that use Wordpress. I just gave you enterprise level consumers using it. You obviously aren't going to use it to build the next eBay or Amazon, but if you're a publisher or need a CMS that does publishing well? I don't really see your issue with it, if it's the right fit. Too many people try to reinvent the wheel. In my experience that more often than not leads to massive overhead and long run problems when it's in venues where it's unnecessary.

I adopted someone's node.js project once, overengineered and cost the company tons of money to run, I rebuilt it in Wordpress for a fairly large regional grocery chain and not only was it vastly cheaper, but the end product was also better and more reliable. So, I'm leery of anyone that writes something off, right off the bat. Pick the best tool for the job, not the ones that is suddenly in vogue to avoid judgement from random devs on HN or Reddit. You can't pigeonhole solutions, be it Wordpress or whatever you decide on.

[luckylion]

Large enterprises using something doesn't make them suitable for large or enterprise-class use-cases.

When I hear "large enterprise CMS", I don't hear "a CMS that can be used by large enterprises" (because everything could, even if it's based on manually editing HTML files), I hear "a CMS suited to be used in large environments with complex requirements and no room for error".

"Enterprise" as an adjective is something that is tailored to the needs of very large entities that, due to the nature of their size, activities and legal environment, have very complex needs, and who also need to deal with things that normal website owners rarely do: legal compliance, different threat levels, audit-logs, fine-grained access privileges, publishing workflows etc.

WordPress isn't the right fit for that. WordPress isn't, and doesn't claim to be, an Enterprise CMS or targeting very large installations. Similarly: while you can manage data in WordPress, if someone suggested building a banking system on top of WordPress, I'd shake my head just the same. But that doesn't mean you can't set up a few post types and add some fields with ACF and have something you can use to organize and document your gardening efforts. They are just _very_ different requirements, and WP doesn't meet (and doesn't aim to meet) those that you associate with "enterprise" (adjective).

Like I said, I don't hate WP, I use it all the time and I know it very well. And for the vast majority of the internet, it's perfectly fine and usually the right choice because it guarantees that you'll always find somebody who can take over maintenance for your project, you'll find plenty of editors that are already familiar with your system, and there's a bajillion themes you can use and be done with it.

But if you need much more than that, you really shouldn't be using WP. Yes, you can (and I do), but you will build so much custom logic on top of it and wrestle it into behaving appropriately, that you'd be better off just not using WP. But 99% of WP sites never hit that ceiling, so for them WP is a fine choice.