4 ms·

> He really hasn't advocated for much Like him or hate him, he grew WordPress to be one of the most popular open source projects of all time. It seems fair to

by runjake 15d ago

> He really hasn't advocated for much Like him or hate him, he grew WordPress to be one of the most popular open source projects of all time. It seems fair to call him a key advocate. WordPress is still GPL licensed.

larodi 15d ago
LLMs will surely fix this ubiquitous position of WP very soon.
- hungryhobbit 15d ago
  Doubtful. Code isn't what keeps OSS projects going: people do. Claude can reproduce Wordpress with enough tokens. Claude cannot reproduce the community of maintainers, plug-in authors, users reporting bugs, etc. that is what any real user of Wordpress actually wants (if they don't want buggy, out of date software with security risks).
  - jmathai 15d ago
    I think a large % of Wordpress usage is for simple websites that are better served by tools simpler than Wordpress. I'm not sure if you've tried to use Wordpress for a simple site. I did recently and it was a horrendous experience.
    - joeguilmette 15d ago
      Ironically, the antiquated model of a bunch of source code and a database sitting on a computer is something coding agents really like. WordPress and a nice page builder with MCP is actually a joy to use, and the absolutely enormous catalog of plugins that are easily extensible and endlessly modifiable makes it so easy to work with when building via agent. Having worked with WordPress for over a decade, I find it hilarious that WooCommerce (the bane of my existence that has inexplicably paid my rent for a gigantic chunk of my adult life) is easier to use and better positioned for building with AI than Shopify. The future is actually pretty bright for WordPress I think.
      - larodi 14d ago
        The absolutely enormous catalogue is an absolute security (and often maintenance) disaster in 2026. Those who have ever delivered actual WP sites know the pain of it. Typical WP setups grow very fast growing towards completely entangled mess of plugins and template hacks as the project matures.
        joeguilmette 14d ago
        I have worked professionally in the WordPress space for over a decade, running teams that make plugins used on probably close to a million sites, I’m a (former?) regional WordCamp organizer, and I’ve built and deployed sites on WordPress for clients, our products, and personal projects ranging in complexity from single page brochure sites to ecommerce/hybrid SaaS monstrosities. The security issues with WordPress aren’t fake, but they are not nearly as bad as the reputation is. The main reason WordPress gets a bad rap is companies like Patchstack have a financial incentive to abuse CVEs and scare people into buying their products. For example, we have had numerous CVEs from them stating that they found an RCE in our plugins (!). Oh no! CVE filed. Reproduction steps: 1. Log in as a site admin with full access to the database and file system of the site. 2. Scroll past an input field in our plugin where you can type in arbitrary PHP and have it executed. 3. Do some magical incantation to fire some useless hook. —— Hello Toyota, I found a security problem- the center console inside the car can be opened by unauthorized users. As some vehicle owners may place valuables there, it exposes them to the possibility of theft. Steps to reproduce: 1. Unlock the car door and enter the vehicle using your key. 2. Open the center console. Proposed security fix: Require the vehicle’s key, an RSA fob, and iris scan to open the center console. You have 15 days to recall all vehicles in your fleet that have an unsecured center console. Here are several blog posts that will be going live after the deadline: • All Toyota Cars Insecure And Anything You Put Inside Can Be Stolen By Anyone Unless You Give Us $50/mo • Toyota Car Alternatives Because of Vulnerability • How To Secure Toyota Cars • Safe Toyota Cars Near Me • Toyota Car Discount Code Security —— Their whole business model is to file CVEs, get to them to rank on Google, and then blast out press releases scaring people into paying for their garbage plugin. There have been real issues, like the Bricks thing, where actual sites did get hacked. But this is a fact of life, if you expose your server/data to the internet at some point it very well may get compromised. I’m sure a few people had a bad day, but if you have a WordPress site and care about security literally all you need to do is put it on a half decent host and they will use a WAF and won’t have to worry about anything. There are plenty of household names running WordPress at scale like Rolling Stone, Time, the White House, Techcrunch, etc. They aren’t doing much different from what a $5/mo blog on GoDaddy gets in terms of security, and they certainly aren’t running Patchstack (I really hope someone doesn't sniff their sites or tell me they are providing a WAF for them etc and prove me wrong lol).
    - overfeed 15d ago
      > I'm not sure if you've tried to use Wordpress for a simple site. I did recently and it was a horrendous experience. As someone who made a number of bespoke backends, WordPress wins on turnkey host-support, ease of content-authorship, familiarity (when handing over or taking over a backend), and breadth and depth of plugins. A lot of people would be well-served by static-site generators, and those were on the rise for a bit. WordPress stays winning because of the user-friendliness of its publishing workflows (vs SSGs), and self-reinforcing ecosystem.
      - jmathai 15d ago
        I hear the words you're saying. But this was not the case for myself setting up Wordpress and trying to help a non-technical user navigate the admin dashboard to manage their content.
  - larodi 14d ago
    You don’t need them 99% of the time as these mods and plugins are effectively what WP lacks. For most trivial sites, and WP does lots of them, they can be promoted. It is much easier to prompt a relatively tight slop doing the same that WP plus dozens of plugins does. Particularly if you know what you’re doing.
- pibaker 14d ago
  LLMs are incredible tools if you are knowledgeable enough about what you want to spell out exactly what you want it to implement for you. The long tail of Wordpress users are, in my experience, not knowledgeable enough to come up with their own solution.
legitster 15d ago
> WordPress is still GPL licensed. Only because it's forced to be because it in turn was a fork of a previous GPL license. It should be noted that Mullenweg has regularly weaponized the GPL license in the past - using it to take out other companies in the ecosystem like in their fight against Thesis.
- ffsm8 15d ago
  How does one weaponize a gpl license in this context?
  - scarecrowbob 15d ago
    You make the CSS and branding into a thing that folks are "discouraged" from distributing. That's most of the WP plugin and theme ecosystem, or was when I retired from it.
  - legitster 14d ago
    Prevent anyone else from profiting off of the ecosystem. Wordpress might technically be GPL, but the code itself routes most of the key features of Wordpress through Automattic. If you have a massive technical moat around the ecosystem, it would make sense to be against erecting walls.
ValentineC 15d ago
> Like him or hate him, he grew WordPress to be one of the most popular open source projects of all time. It seems fair to call him a key advocate. As someone who has contributed to WordPress: WordPress grew on the back of volunteers. It would be unfair to most non-Automattic "volunteers" if he was attributed all/most credit for what it had become, especially pre-Gutenberg.
scarecrowbob 15d ago
I'm thankfully about 4 years out of making a living un-fucking WP sites but one of the strangest things about the ecosystem is about "for-sale" GPL software. It's felt somewhat unique to WP for sure, though maybe there are other examples where swaths of communities get big mad when people suggest distributing GPL software for free. I found it a little repellent, but lots of folks scraped together micro-scale businesses selling plugins and themes. I believe I made a lot better living building stuff for clients and then not caring about what they did with the software, but hey, I'm not the boss of folks trying to make a living supporting a $10 lifetime membership to an image size selecting plugin. Anyhow, my point is that there is at least a little nuance to be found when thinking about WP and open source software.
- rincebrain 15d ago
  The WRT54G community tried this for a while. Red Hat most memorably has tried it with "technically you are legally permitted to distribute these things we are giving you under contract but we will terminate your contract if you do."
  - Brian_K_White 13d ago
    [dead]

by runjake 15d ago

larodi 15d ago

LLMs will surely fix this ubiquitous position of WP very soon.

hungryhobbit 15d ago
Doubtful. Code isn't what keeps OSS projects going: people do. Claude can reproduce Wordpress with enough tokens. Claude cannot reproduce the community of maintainers, plug-in authors, users reporting bugs, etc. that is what any real user of Wordpress actually wants (if they don't want buggy, out of date software with security risks).
- jmathai 15d ago
  I think a large % of Wordpress usage is for simple websites that are better served by tools simpler than Wordpress. I'm not sure if you've tried to use Wordpress for a simple site. I did recently and it was a horrendous experience.
  - joeguilmette 15d ago
    Ironically, the antiquated model of a bunch of source code and a database sitting on a computer is something coding agents really like. WordPress and a nice page builder with MCP is actually a joy to use, and the absolutely enormous catalog of plugins that are easily extensible and endlessly modifiable makes it so easy to work with when building via agent. Having worked with WordPress for over a decade, I find it hilarious that WooCommerce (the bane of my existence that has inexplicably paid my rent for a gigantic chunk of my adult life) is easier to use and better positioned for building with AI than Shopify. The future is actually pretty bright for WordPress I think.
    - larodi 14d ago
      The absolutely enormous catalogue is an absolute security (and often maintenance) disaster in 2026. Those who have ever delivered actual WP sites know the pain of it. Typical WP setups grow very fast growing towards completely entangled mess of plugins and template hacks as the project matures.
      - joeguilmette 14d ago
        I have worked professionally in the WordPress space for over a decade, running teams that make plugins used on probably close to a million sites, I’m a (former?) regional WordCamp organizer, and I’ve built and deployed sites on WordPress for clients, our products, and personal projects ranging in complexity from single page brochure sites to ecommerce/hybrid SaaS monstrosities. The security issues with WordPress aren’t fake, but they are not nearly as bad as the reputation is. The main reason WordPress gets a bad rap is companies like Patchstack have a financial incentive to abuse CVEs and scare people into buying their products. For example, we have had numerous CVEs from them stating that they found an RCE in our plugins (!). Oh no! CVE filed. Reproduction steps: 1. Log in as a site admin with full access to the database and file system of the site. 2. Scroll past an input field in our plugin where you can type in arbitrary PHP and have it executed. 3. Do some magical incantation to fire some useless hook. —— Hello Toyota, I found a security problem- the center console inside the car can be opened by unauthorized users. As some vehicle owners may place valuables there, it exposes them to the possibility of theft. Steps to reproduce: 1. Unlock the car door and enter the vehicle using your key. 2. Open the center console. Proposed security fix: Require the vehicle’s key, an RSA fob, and iris scan to open the center console. You have 15 days to recall all vehicles in your fleet that have an unsecured center console. Here are several blog posts that will be going live after the deadline: • All Toyota Cars Insecure And Anything You Put Inside Can Be Stolen By Anyone Unless You Give Us $50/mo • Toyota Car Alternatives Because of Vulnerability • How To Secure Toyota Cars • Safe Toyota Cars Near Me • Toyota Car Discount Code Security —— Their whole business model is to file CVEs, get to them to rank on Google, and then blast out press releases scaring people into paying for their garbage plugin. There have been real issues, like the Bricks thing, where actual sites did get hacked. But this is a fact of life, if you expose your server/data to the internet at some point it very well may get compromised. I’m sure a few people had a bad day, but if you have a WordPress site and care about security literally all you need to do is put it on a half decent host and they will use a WAF and won’t have to worry about anything. There are plenty of household names running WordPress at scale like Rolling Stone, Time, the White House, Techcrunch, etc. They aren’t doing much different from what a $5/mo blog on GoDaddy gets in terms of security, and they certainly aren’t running Patchstack (I really hope someone doesn't sniff their sites or tell me they are providing a WAF for them etc and prove me wrong lol).
  - overfeed 15d ago
    > I'm not sure if you've tried to use Wordpress for a simple site. I did recently and it was a horrendous experience. As someone who made a number of bespoke backends, WordPress wins on turnkey host-support, ease of content-authorship, familiarity (when handing over or taking over a backend), and breadth and depth of plugins. A lot of people would be well-served by static-site generators, and those were on the rise for a bit. WordPress stays winning because of the user-friendliness of its publishing workflows (vs SSGs), and self-reinforcing ecosystem.
    - jmathai 15d ago
      I hear the words you're saying. But this was not the case for myself setting up Wordpress and trying to help a non-technical user navigate the admin dashboard to manage their content.
- larodi 14d ago
  You don’t need them 99% of the time as these mods and plugins are effectively what WP lacks. For most trivial sites, and WP does lots of them, they can be promoted. It is much easier to prompt a relatively tight slop doing the same that WP plus dozens of plugins does. Particularly if you know what you’re doing.
pibaker 14d ago
LLMs are incredible tools if you are knowledgeable enough about what you want to spell out exactly what you want it to implement for you. The long tail of Wordpress users are, in my experience, not knowledgeable enough to come up with their own solution.

legitster 15d ago

> WordPress is still GPL licensed. Only because it's forced to be because it in turn was a fork of a previous GPL license. It should be noted that Mullenweg has regularly weaponized the GPL license in the past - using it to take out other companies in the ecosystem like in their fight against Thesis.

ffsm8 15d ago
How does one weaponize a gpl license in this context?
- scarecrowbob 15d ago
  You make the CSS and branding into a thing that folks are "discouraged" from distributing. That's most of the WP plugin and theme ecosystem, or was when I retired from it.
- legitster 14d ago
  Prevent anyone else from profiting off of the ecosystem. Wordpress might technically be GPL, but the code itself routes most of the key features of Wordpress through Automattic. If you have a massive technical moat around the ecosystem, it would make sense to be against erecting walls.

ValentineC 15d ago

> Like him or hate him, he grew WordPress to be one of the most popular open source projects of all time. It seems fair to call him a key advocate. As someone who has contributed to WordPress: WordPress grew on the back of volunteers. It would be unfair to most non-Automattic "volunteers" if he was attributed all/most credit for what it had become, especially pre-Gutenberg.

scarecrowbob 15d ago

I'm thankfully about 4 years out of making a living un-fucking WP sites but one of the strangest things about the ecosystem is about "for-sale" GPL software. It's felt somewhat unique to WP for sure, though maybe there are other examples where swaths of communities get big mad when people suggest distributing GPL software for free. I found it a little repellent, but lots of folks scraped together micro-scale businesses selling plugins and themes. I believe I made a lot better living building stuff for clients and then not caring about what they did with the software, but hey, I'm not the boss of folks trying to make a living supporting a $10 lifetime membership to an image size selecting plugin. Anyhow, my point is that there is at least a little nuance to be found when thinking about WP and open source software.

rincebrain 15d ago
The WRT54G community tried this for a while. Red Hat most memorably has tried it with "technically you are legally permitted to distribute these things we are giving you under contract but we will terminate your contract if you do."
- Brian_K_White 13d ago
  [dead]