[bigiain]

I'm not fan of the codebase, but until something else comes along that's as easy for my clients to learn/use - I'm going to keep on recommending and installing WordPress for them.

Anybody who's used a word processor can pick up most of what they need to know to work as an author or editor in WordPress in a afternoon. I'm not about to recreate all the widely available documentation and tutorials WordPress has available - or explain to my clients "all you need to do is write all your website content in MarkDown, then run this Ruby script from the command line to publish it to S3/CloudFront!"

[ceol]

I imagine the reason most people use WordPress isn't because of the authoring or editing — most of which can be replicated easily using things like TinyMCE — but the ecosystem of themes and plugins. Your technologically-inept client has access to a vast number of free, cheap, and easily installable themes to style their website whatever gaudy way they want.

There are plenty of better publishing solutions in terms of codebase, and there are plenty of solutions that offer equal or better user interfaces, but none that bring the ability to choose from hundreds of thousands of themes to style a website, which is the main focus of your average blog publisher.