wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.

yes you want a global db handle sure ya lets delete all tables woohoo

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coldtea a day ago | parent | next [-]

If it powers 30-50% of the web, including thousands of major websites, it works at some level.

Ivory tower "just don't use a low-cost solution" people aren't going to hand over money to people to use a higher-cost one, are they?

And ignoring why it's used besides the sloppiness means they have a huge blind spot to what people actually want:

"wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious"

Nothing in this quote doesn't describe very real needs.

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busterarm 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.

You've sort of nailed it, but this isn't a bad thing. An alternative for these customers does not exist.

There's another vertical which is organizations that have armies of writers churning out content. Any kind of publisher or advertiser, basically. There is no better CMS for this. Large organizations like NYT, etc chose to write their own.

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sp1nningaway 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

>> wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.

> You've sort of nailed it, but this isn't a bad thing. An alternative for these customers does not exist.

Yes! I'm locked into WordPress, which I hate, because it's the only platform that will allow a non-developer to maintain it if I get hit by a bus.

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QuantumGood 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I started building sites for clients in the late '90's, and quickly made "client can edit their phone number on all pages" a key requirement. Wordpress with a WYSIWYG page builder solves that — it's not the only solution, but it works pretty close to right out of the box.

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busterarm 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Which also allows you to not be on call 24/7.

A decade ago I had to learn and run WordPress for a job. I held my nose up the stink was so bad. But quickly I learned how to manage it and have modern sensible practices around it and I've probably gotten more real value out of it than any other CMS or web framework I've touched. That includes Rails.

Thankfully I don't have to do that anymore, but you can sanely and safely run WordPress today and there's zero shame in it.

	▲	bombcar 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		There are options that can be run by anyone, but they're often very constrained in what they can do and show. Wordpress is solidly in that middle ground where you can do a large amount of customization if someone'll pay for it, and then they can do the day-to-day care and feeding of it. Everything else has either been much worse in all possible ways (Joomla!) or has been a collection of developer wish-lists unusable by anyone (Drupal).

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carlosjobim a day ago | parent | prev [-]

There are better alternatives, for as little as $10 per month. If your clients think such a cost is too much, then you want better clients.

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calvinmorrison 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

yep. we like it because with shopify or other platforms, you run into limitations. with Wordpress I can literally just whip it into whatever shape i want.