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I'd almost like to see it go the other way. WordPress is a good blog, but a poor CMS choice for anything but the most basic of websites. I reckon the "66%" that

by EnderMB 14y ago

I'd almost like to see it go the other way. WordPress is a good blog, but a poor CMS choice for anything but the most basic of websites. I reckon the "66%" that use WordPress use it for personal sites or very small business sites (1-10 visitors a day) on shared hosting. There are huge sites using it, but they seem to be the exception that proves the rule. I cannot see why people use WordPress over the likes of Concrete5 or a full CMS on any other platform outside of WordPress being accessible for entry-level developers. For this reason, a full rewrite of WordPress to be solely a basic CMS would probably have these novice developers flock to the system, allowing WordPress to scale back down to doing what it does best.

gabemart 14y ago
>I cannot see why people use WordPress over the likes of Concrete5 or a full CMS on any other platform outside of WordPress being accessible for entry-level developers. I run a very modestly profitable website that gets about 1k visitors per day. I'm not even an "entry-level developer", I'm not a developer at all, with only the most rudimentary ability to kludge together a little JS and php. I chose Wordpress for the site, even though it's not a blog. In fact, creating a system where posts weren't displayed in chronological order actually took a few hours of blindly hacking at various WP functions. The reasons I chose Wordpress over an existing CMS: * I already know how to use WP * There is a vast array of FLOSS themes and plugins to meet virtually any need available * Wordpress is well supported by shared hosting and managed VPS providers (through cpanel etc.) * It's relatively easy to get free high-level support through IRC because so many people know WP Most of these reasons are inertia based. It would be a vast undertaking to create a CMS version of Wordpress that actually gained traction because, awkward as WP is, it has an enormous library of free existing solutions to take on virtually any problem. This quality, which the author of the article complains about, it the same reason WP would be so hard to kill. Even if your product is better for a given purpose, people aren't going to give up the advantages of WP I outlined above just for an incremental improvement in UX or speed.
photomatt 14y ago
Because it's easy to develop for, can scale to be one of the top ten sites on the internet, and your users won't need training to use it. Now I'll be the first to tell people there are certain things that you should build from scratch, but the examples of what people build with WordPress can be pretty breathtaking even to me: http://wordpress.org/showcase/ http://wordpress.org/showcase/
- papsosouid 14y ago
  Which top 10 site is running on wordpress? And how much of it is static content being served by a cache and completely avoiding wordpress at all?
  - photomatt 14y ago
    Fair question: WordPress.com. This list from Quantcast has WP.com at #16 https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites/US/1 https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites/US/1 But that only includes *.wordpress.com subdomains, and our highest traffic blogs almost always invest the money to have their own domain. We have a tag[0] to track those in Quantcast, and it's currently at 129.7M people in the US, which would place it between Facebook (143M) and MSN (98M). (Blogger might have a similar boost into the top 10, but I don't see any others in the top 50 that could have so many mapped domains.) Of course we cache, with a publicly available WP plugin called Batcache.[1] [0] http://cl.ly/image/081G1r2f0Z18 http://cl.ly/image/081G1r2f0Z18 [1] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/batcache/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/batcache/
    - papsosouid 14y ago
      So, none of them? It doesn't include other domains and it shouldn't include other domains. Really, it is being exceedingly generous in that estimation already. Hosting thousands of totally independent, small sites is trivial, and does not require scaling wordpress in any significant way. Facebook is one site, all their data needs to be able to be accessed by all their software. Bob's blog and Joe's blog are totally independent, and have no need to be on the same software or hardware at all. Thus making scaling a non-issue. I agree that using caching is normal, but the difference is the total reliance on caching. I wouldn't be impressed with google's scalability either if it were 99.9999% static pages being served up.
mokash 14y ago
I run a Wordpress blog hosted on a Micro EC2 instance capable of handling dozens of thousands of visitors every day.

by EnderMB 14y ago

gabemart 14y ago

>I cannot see why people use WordPress over the likes of Concrete5 or a full CMS on any other platform outside of WordPress being accessible for entry-level developers. I run a very modestly profitable website that gets about 1k visitors per day. I'm not even an "entry-level developer", I'm not a developer at all, with only the most rudimentary ability to kludge together a little JS and php. I chose Wordpress for the site, even though it's not a blog. In fact, creating a system where posts weren't displayed in chronological order actually took a few hours of blindly hacking at various WP functions. The reasons I chose Wordpress over an existing CMS: * I already know how to use WP * There is a vast array of FLOSS themes and plugins to meet virtually any need available * Wordpress is well supported by shared hosting and managed VPS providers (through cpanel etc.) * It's relatively easy to get free high-level support through IRC because so many people know WP Most of these reasons are inertia based. It would be a vast undertaking to create a CMS version of Wordpress that actually gained traction because, awkward as WP is, it has an enormous library of free existing solutions to take on virtually any problem. This quality, which the author of the article complains about, it the same reason WP would be so hard to kill. Even if your product is better for a given purpose, people aren't going to give up the advantages of WP I outlined above just for an incremental improvement in UX or speed.

photomatt 14y ago

Because it's easy to develop for, can scale to be one of the top ten sites on the internet, and your users won't need training to use it. Now I'll be the first to tell people there are certain things that you should build from scratch, but the examples of what people build with WordPress can be pretty breathtaking even to me: http://wordpress.org/showcase/ http://wordpress.org/showcase/

papsosouid 14y ago
Which top 10 site is running on wordpress? And how much of it is static content being served by a cache and completely avoiding wordpress at all?
- photomatt 14y ago
  Fair question: WordPress.com. This list from Quantcast has WP.com at #16 https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites/US/1 https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites/US/1 But that only includes *.wordpress.com subdomains, and our highest traffic blogs almost always invest the money to have their own domain. We have a tag[0] to track those in Quantcast, and it's currently at 129.7M people in the US, which would place it between Facebook (143M) and MSN (98M). (Blogger might have a similar boost into the top 10, but I don't see any others in the top 50 that could have so many mapped domains.) Of course we cache, with a publicly available WP plugin called Batcache.[1] [0] http://cl.ly/image/081G1r2f0Z18 http://cl.ly/image/081G1r2f0Z18 [1] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/batcache/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/batcache/
  - papsosouid 14y ago
    So, none of them? It doesn't include other domains and it shouldn't include other domains. Really, it is being exceedingly generous in that estimation already. Hosting thousands of totally independent, small sites is trivial, and does not require scaling wordpress in any significant way. Facebook is one site, all their data needs to be able to be accessed by all their software. Bob's blog and Joe's blog are totally independent, and have no need to be on the same software or hardware at all. Thus making scaling a non-issue. I agree that using caching is normal, but the difference is the total reliance on caching. I wouldn't be impressed with google's scalability either if it were 99.9999% static pages being served up.

mokash 14y ago

I run a Wordpress blog hosted on a Micro EC2 instance capable of handling dozens of thousands of visitors every day.