At this point you will definitely think "Oh, but the people dont know about good code quality".
They don't. And they don't have to know. They know what reflects on their websites, businesses, actual livelihoods. Those who use WordPress are not disattached MBAs managing gigantic organizations. They are people whose lives actually hang on those websites and ecommerce sites. What the software does actually dictate their income, their livelihoods.
For that reason they absolutely don't care about any esoteric programming paradigm or code quality which is !supposed! to impact their livelihoods greatly, but for some reason, it just doesn't. Definitely not to the degree that the proponents of criticism like yours think it does.
Only WordPress came forward as the software that cares about those end users' websites, businesses, livelihoods, by prioritizing them instead of 'good quality code' or programming paradigms and protecting backwards compatibility as if the existence of the world depended on it.
Whereas all the other competing software and even actual services including large tech giants on the other hand, literally played with people's livelihoods by introducing backwards incompatible versions in the name of 'better code and programming' - breaking the websites and shops that those people's lives depended on.
And it turns out that you can break someone's website or ecommerce site by introducing backwards incompatible updates once, twice, and a third time you wont be able to do that because that person will have moved on to a software that doesn't play with his livelihood like it was a little hobby project.
That's precisely why WordPress won. While in mid 2000s all the competitors were breaking their users' websites by pushing out backwards-incompatible versions, WordPress fought tooth and nail to protect backwards incompatibility.
The result is trusting users and a gigantic ecosystem of plugins and themes that allows anyone to do literally anything they want. People became able to just click a button to install a plugin and make literally complex features happen.
What was happening on the side of competitors during that period? Well, they were forcing people to write entire freaking modules just to add one measly form on their websites. Because, 'coding paradigms'.
That's why the flower shop owner somewhere in Oregon runs his local flower business on his WordPress site and the notable anime blogger somewhere in Tokyo is on WordPress more than 15 years. WordPress treats their websites with care, knowing that those sites and shops are actually those people's homes on the Internet, and refrains from breaking anything or doing anything that could impact those people negatively in the name of 'better paradigms'.
Speaking of better paradigms, is there any yet?
Back in mid 2000s OOP was the end-all-be-all. Everything had to be OOP. All the cacophony even forced WordPress to introduce objects everwhere around its code. Because, 'better paradigms', right.
And then a few years later suddenly functional programming is much better! Or, half of the programmers say so. Suddenly everyone is going in the other direction, whereas the die-hards of OOP still insist that it is 'the thing'.
It was just a few years ago that hooks in React were going to change everything. Everybody! Move to hooks! Then it just turns out that hooks aren't so good after all. Literaly 2 year fad. Also everyone has to move to React or some other bloated framework, because, you know, you have to have a 'modern' frontend, right. Then suddenly people start saying that maybe not everything needs that much dom manipulation after all, and rendering everything on the server and serving the user something that his or her device can handle is much better. Who would have thought. But all of these cacophony forced even WordPress to adopt some React. Because, 'modern', you know...
So this kind of programming fads even impacted WordPress, but WordPress still spent the effort to avoid any of those fads from breaking people's websites.
And that's why its 50% of the web and 30% of all ecommerce today. Because it prioritizes its users and their livelihoods. As opposed to programming fads and elitism.
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Make no mistake - this paradigm does not only cripple the competitors of WordPress. It also cripples software industry in general, including tech giants. Living in our own world, thinking that the paradigms we have in programming are all important for everyone as opposed to just a fraction of our modern tech jobs, we prioritize the wrong things instead of prioritizing the actual users of the software and their livelihoods. Leading to literally crippling people's websites, apps and kicking their livelihood in the butt, losing them to whichever ecosystem that does not do such neglectful and out-of-touch things. An excellent example of this is shown by Google. It turns out even being a top tech giant does not allow one to avoid the repercussions of not prioritizing the users and instead playing with their livelihoods as if they were pet projects.
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
Wordpress is a single, glaring, liability. It indirectly prevents improvements to other people’s code; encourages proliferation of outdated and insecure code outside of the WP ecosystem; and causes increasing friction with the rest of the world (just look at projects like this one, which attempts to contain all of Wordpress‘ weirdness as much as possible). Just because Wordpress filled the CMS niche decades back and has a huge ecosystem moat now, still doesn’t mean it’s a good solution. It’s a chicken and egg problem, and all this fussing about caring about their users misses the point. Other people care about their users and deliver rock-solid software too, they just don’t fit in your narrative.
This isn’t about adhering to some highly ideal, but protecting those very people you care about.
I’m not going into the rant on cloud providers you seem to veer to, however. I’ve also made my points in other comments already.
That goes for all software that reaches a certain usage. There are no exceptions, including WordPress competitors.
Is there any actual study backed by actual data which demonstrates that WordPress is any more vulnerable than ANY other software that is widely used? Like, taking into account Windows computers that may be rarely connected to the Internet or taking into account how the entire Linux server ecosystem is run by sysadmins and not end users like WordPress? And then comparing the security cases in all of those software to the WordPress and actually demonstrating by data that WordPress is more vulnerable?
OF course not. All this criticism stems from the fact that WordPress security situations are more frequently encountered and publicized instead of any objective comparison. Which should have indicated that the entire ecosystem has a very good practice of vigorously tracking, publicizing and fixing these vulnerabilities and that should have been a point of praise, but no. Instead, baseless criticism is directed at it without taking into account that it is used in HALF of all the websites on the planet and even more importantly, actual end users.
Additionally most of those vulnerabilities come from the plugins in the ecosystem. Not WordPress. This is without counting in the fact that WordPress is hosted mostly on consumer web hosts whose security may affect the software itself.
And there is a very good reason for that - WordPress allows users freedom to do whatever they want. More than allowing it, people DEMAND it and they get it. Because that's how they can do what they want to do with their website or shop. Therefore its pretty common for a user to configure his or her website in an insecure fashion despite all warnings, guides and setup wizards that advise against such things. You cannot prevent people's freedom in their own website when they are hosting it themselves.
In contrast, Wordpress sites and shops that are hosted in managed services run without such security issues. Neither CNN's website or Reuters' website that runs on managed WP hosting gets hacked. Nor the millions of websites that run on other managed services.
There is a tradeoff in letting users do what they want and limiting what they do. Letting users do what they want looks like it introduces risk, but it also enables anyone to do anything.
And that's precisely why all those users are STILL on WordPress. Including the ones who got their sites hacked multiple times. They didnt move on to a 'more secure' software. They didnt move on to a 'more secure' SaaS, they didnt move anywhere.
> In a lot of cases, this was the direct result of straight-out incompetence on behalf of the Wordpress maintainers and plug-in authors.
This looks like singling out WordPress ecosystem in totally discriminatory fashion. How was the security situation with Windows? Top tech giant's software? What about actual intelligence agencies that conduct actual cyberwarfare and spend trillions on it?
All of them got hacked. All of them got security vulnerabilities. Despite the latter being a very specific, very narrow band of activity to boot. Nothing like WordPress enabling innumerable things to be done on its platform.
> Just because Wordpress filled the CMS niche decades back and has a huge ecosystem moat now
If WordPress was not good enough, it would not have filled the CMS 'niche' DECADES back and it wouldnt have a huge ecosystem now.
Leaving aside that it sounds outright absurd to call 50% of the web and 30% of ecommerce 'niche'...
> Wordpress is a single, glaring, liability. It indirectly prevents improvements to other people’s code; encourages proliferation of outdated and insecure code outside of the WP ecosystem
All of those are patently false. Sorry, but if you dont know enough about the ecosystem, dont make grandstanding statements on it:
The majority of the plugins in WP ecosystem do not interact with WP code directly and instead use hooks and filters. Thats it. Nothing else. They are freaking hooks and filters that allow you to do things with whatever passes through them. So there is nothing about 'Wordpress code enabling insecurities'. In reality, WordPress actively encourages people to use hooks and filters and to avoid doing anything directly with the WordPress code itself.
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At this point Ill leave this discussion. You are basically ranting on literally scarce knowledge of the topic you have very strong sentiments about. That's not a basis for rational discussion.
> this disgrace of a platform
It looks like this needs to be hammered home: That disgrace of a platform is running 50% of the web and 30% of all ecommerce websites. And every year it adds 3% on top of those percentages.
If 50% of the internet runs on something, its not the platform that runs it that's the disgrace - its the baseless elitism that targets it. The very emotional nature of the selection of your words demonstrate the irrationality of the criticism.
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If its good for CNN's websites, its good for anyone's website. That's that.
