WordPress is easy to learn. Technologies that are easy to learn tend to attract a lot of people. Once the people learn enough that they are no longer beginners

WordPress is easy to learn. Technologies that are easy to learn tend to attract a lot of people. Once the people learn enough that they are no longer beginners, then they want more features, more abilities. Rewind the clock to 1999 and you could say the same thing about PHP. It did well because it was easy for beginners to learn. I think a lot of the people who read Hacker News are people with considerable experience in the tech world. As such, it is easy for them to underestimate the importance of having some technologies that are easy for beginners to learn. It is easy to make fun of a beginner. But everyone starts off as a beginner. More so, technologies that are easy to learn tend to have a resilience that complicated technologies lack. There will always be some version of BASIC out there, even as other, better languages are forgotten. I do most of my development with Symfony. As such, there is a part of me that thinks application frameworks (Symfony, Ruby On Rails, Django) should be used for all projects. But the application frameworks are only for experienced programmers. I would have felt overwhelmed if my first exposure to computer programming had been Symfony, or Ruby on Rails, or Django. WordPress does a fantastic job enabling relative beginners to achieve a lot. It deserves praise for that. It offers people a smooth path to move deeper into programming, should they wish to move that way. I've had friends who first learned PHP dealing with WordPress, and later became good PHP programmers overall, and more recently I see them learning other technologies. In another era they might have learned with Visual Basic or Hypercard or Applescript or any of the previous attempts to build systems that enabled beginners to program. But for the last few years, WordPress has occupied that niche in the world of programming. More so, WordPress is a great platform for web designers to work from. For the intelligent designer who does not want to become a programmer, WordPress lets them do a lot of customization, without knowing much of the technical details of what they are doing. It is easy to curse WordPress for its security flaws. For that reason, it is important to remember how good it is at the things it gets right. I agree with elidourado: this is an opportunity for entrepreneurs. The popularity of WordPress, and its occasional problems, provides a good market for services that help designers and other programmers achieve what they wish. Darren Hoyt and I started one such service, a paid question and answer site focused on WordPress: http://www.wpquestions.com/ http://www.wpquestions.com/ It is also worth noting that WordPress is one of the larger categories on eLance: http://www.elance.com/skills_directory http://www.elance.com/skills_directory It is appropriate to complain about the security flaws in WordPress, but entrepreneurs will also think hard about what kind of services can help all the people who need help with it.