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Genuinely interested: which are the “better coded” competitors? An earlier post here on hn by dan about web bloat seemed to show wordpress was actually the best

Genuinely interested: which are the “better coded” competitors? An earlier post here on hn by dan about web bloat seemed to show wordpress was actually the best option in that category?

zrn900 3y ago
Name your pick. Most of the competitors of WP back in the late mid-2000s went the way of 'better coding', busying themselves with MVC implementations, migrating everything to OOP because it was 'the way' and so on. WP went for ease of use, ease of modification and easy extensibility etc. At one point the disparage between it and its competitors was so high that in some wp competitors, you had to code an entire module just to add some text to a web form. With WP you just edited a file. > An earlier post here on hn by dan about web bloat seemed to show wordpress was actually the best option in that category? Yep, that's the irony. All the competitors kept adopting 'better coding paradigms' as their respective fads hit their maximum, ending up in bloated stuff. They occasionally had to break backward compatibility to get rid of the code that was adopted in that fashion too - doing much harm to their ecosystems. But WP went for ease of use, simplicity, and from another angle, having to protect backward compatibility that WP project gave so much importance helped it keep itself lean, mean and simple. So now WP is something you can just launch in a total of 2 second from zero to production-ready thanks to one-click installs, hosts and all the infra providers that offer it, with ridiculously low initial and ongoing costs. Also because it didn't buy into the recent frontend fads and stayed server-side rendered, it still remains very lightweight and renders in an average of ~1.5 seconds in any device/browser. Of course, some of the framework craze made its way to wp in the form of React and full site editing, but still, the general landscape remains lightweight especially if you use hybrid themes. (they allow all the fse and page builder functionalities by trading off only not being able to edit header & footer by dragging & dropping, so its a good trade-off). In a way, WP having to deal directly with the actual users whose priorities were always on the practical side helped it a LOT in getting the market share it has and the reliability, extensibility and ease of use it still excels in.

Genuinely interested: which are the “better coded” competitors? An earlier post here on hn by dan about web bloat seemed to show wordpress was actually the best option in that category?

zrn900 3y ago

Name your pick. Most of the competitors of WP back in the late mid-2000s went the way of 'better coding', busying themselves with MVC implementations, migrating everything to OOP because it was 'the way' and so on. WP went for ease of use, ease of modification and easy extensibility etc. At one point the disparage between it and its competitors was so high that in some wp competitors, you had to code an entire module just to add some text to a web form. With WP you just edited a file. > An earlier post here on hn by dan about web bloat seemed to show wordpress was actually the best option in that category? Yep, that's the irony. All the competitors kept adopting 'better coding paradigms' as their respective fads hit their maximum, ending up in bloated stuff. They occasionally had to break backward compatibility to get rid of the code that was adopted in that fashion too - doing much harm to their ecosystems. But WP went for ease of use, simplicity, and from another angle, having to protect backward compatibility that WP project gave so much importance helped it keep itself lean, mean and simple. So now WP is something you can just launch in a total of 2 second from zero to production-ready thanks to one-click installs, hosts and all the infra providers that offer it, with ridiculously low initial and ongoing costs. Also because it didn't buy into the recent frontend fads and stayed server-side rendered, it still remains very lightweight and renders in an average of ~1.5 seconds in any device/browser. Of course, some of the framework craze made its way to wp in the form of React and full site editing, but still, the general landscape remains lightweight especially if you use hybrid themes. (they allow all the fse and page builder functionalities by trading off only not being able to edit header & footer by dragging & dropping, so its a good trade-off). In a way, WP having to deal directly with the actual users whose priorities were always on the practical side helped it a LOT in getting the market share it has and the reliability, extensibility and ease of use it still excels in.