This is partially the reason why WordPress is still so popular; it's incredibly easy to deploy and works on pretty much every shared server known to man. It's a

This is partially the reason why WordPress is still so popular; it's incredibly easy to deploy and works on pretty much every shared server known to man. It's also why, as nice as it is, stuff like Ghost is pretty much forever doomed to be less popular; it's just trickier to set up on shared hosting or for someone who doesn't know anything about server management. It's also why the likes of Media Wiki (for wikis) and the old guard forum scripts (phpBB/MyBB/SMF/vBulletin/XenForo/IPB) haven't been dethroned in their markets too; using PHP means setting them up is basically trivial compared to competitors in other languages. So if you're trying to compete with one of these scripts, maybe bite the bullet and just go with PHP like they did. It may not seem as 'cool' as going with a more modern language or tech stack, but it makes your script easy to deploy and gives it a lot more server support too, which likely outweighs those other factors if you're aiming for the wider market.