> So if I'm following correctly, you are saying that WordPress was successful in the first place because of its high code quality and software development pract

> So if I'm following correctly, you are saying that WordPress was successful in the first place because of its high code quality and software development practices, right? WordPress was successful because it prioritized its users' needs and backwards compatibility over high code quality and software development practices. > WordPress works great from a business standpoint Yeah. That's whats important to 50% of the web and 30% of ecommerce websites. > but it is not well made. There is the critical angle - users don't give two shts about that. Many 'well made' apps, frameworks, projects faded away over the decades because they were 'well made' first, and 'user-oriented' second. 'Well made' code and 'good programming practices' made their inroads into the WP project and ecosystem in the past decade. They really did not provide much value compared to the complications they brought. And most were just discarded or they just faded away. > I've spent the past month developing plugins for my own WordPress website, and it is laughable how bad it is Its not. From the moment you catch on to the common practices, its a delight. Code is easy to write. Its immediately compatible with 60,000+ plugins, you immediately get access to 50% of the web. There is nothing comparable. > the official advice to understanding things is not to read their documentation, it's "look through the code lol" [1]. That relates to the plugin ecosystem. Not the core. And for the plugin ecosystem, that is true - its faster to check through the code of many plugins than going through the documentation. If you have such a need to develop a plugin for ANOTHER plugin, which is an independent project than WP core itself, that's pretty normal. And it beats the majority of OSS projects in that sense anyway - you have flexibility. > It's probably fair, since their documentation is so bad it does not explain what any of the parameters of the functions are most of the time Huh? All the functions in the core have their documentation in trac and multiple other places. > And, well, that code was probably okay in 2005, but it's hot garbage in 2022. Users don't give a sht about that. That hot garbage in 2022 still works like it worked in 2005. The small store owner somewhere in the US or the NGO somewhere in Asia never had to upgrade anything on their site for it to keep working. THAT is why they love WordPress. Because it helps them run their businesses and lives than having them deal with programmers' trappings about 'cool code'. ... Your approach and the approach of various others in this thread seem to be a simple case of engineers' perspective being totally out of touch with the perspectives of the actual users. You think something is 'better'. Whereas to the actual user, they are not. This actually explains how large engineering-oriented organizations like Google can fail their user base so easily.