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by devmor 116 days ago
As someone who built full ecommerce websites on wordpress over 15 years ago, I can tell you exactly why it hasn't been replaced - the plugin/theme ecosystem.

There are tens of thousands of plugins and themes to make a Wordpress website do whatever you want and look however you want, either for free or a very low fee. You have to replace that entire ecosystem for the same price to replace Wordpress.

No matter how many times people get hacked, the perceived value of getting something for nothing outweighs the eventual cost.
2 comments
hparadiz 116 days ago
I did a short contract a few years back where multiple WordPress plugins were pulling different versions of guzzle and I had to use a namespace rewriter to be able to run multiple guzzle versions at the same time.

The thing about WordPress is you can put it on a box and lock it down so hard you just treat it as an untrusted process on your server.

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shimman 116 days ago
Maybe it's just my poor imagination but how many plugins are truly unique to WP that you can't find on other CMSs? The only ones that come to mind would be those plugins that help connect to various B2B or B2C workflows, is that where the gold is mostly found?
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AlienRobot 116 days ago
WP essentially lets plugins do anything they want. The plugins are just scripts that register callbacks to events. WP calls events on BASICALLY EVERY FUNCTION. This is without exaggeration. I don't remember the exact names right now, but if you have a function like wp_get_title that gets the title of a post, there will be a "get_title" event that can modify which title is returned. So for every function first the data is computed using the default WP way, then plugins are allowed to discard all that work and replace it without something else entirely. There are events for deciding the canonical URL, for deciding the description of a post, for deciding whether RSS links will be displayed or not (the callback just returns true or false), etc.

In other words, every property can be modified through global event callbacks. Some events are called very early in the whole pipeline that let plugins just render whatever they want (e.g. render custom XML sitemaps).

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