5 ms·

Reasons Why WordPress Made PHP Popular, not PHP Frameworks

31 points by lkrubner 13y ago

ceejayoz 13y ago
Comparing Google Trends for WordPress - which has a multi-million blog network as part of the results - against framework names seems to have some pretty significant issues. PHP was already popular and widely available when WordPress became popular. WordPress benefited from that - it was much easier to install and find hosting versus the then-leader MovableType.
- krapp 13y ago
  Its being better than Movable Type is the only reason I ever switched to Wordpress.
PBxdId7wFr 13y ago
PHP suck! 8===D~
grumps 13y ago
This is just a bunch of self righteous crap. blah blah blah "WordPress is awesome..."
dictum 13y ago
WordPress benefited from the fact that PHP hosting was always cheaper (even free) than hosts that supported Perl or Python (this was a little before Ruby became popular through Rails). You could find oversold hosting plans for as little as $1,99/mo. As ceejayoz mentioned, PHP was already popular before WP. Arguably, forum software written in PHP made PHP popular before b2/cafelog (WP's predecessor) appeared.
- nonchalance 13y ago
  > WordPress benefited from the fact that PHP hosting was always cheaper (even free) than hosts that supported Perl or Python (this was a little before Ruby became popular through Rails). You could find oversold hosting plans for as little as $1,99/mo. Why was/is that the case?
  - kristopolous 13y ago
    I'm guessing it's the "oversold" portion. There's probably quite a few "idea people" out there that are paying the monthly fee for their facetubebay[1] idea and are just looking for the right technical team to work for the equity. Really. I bet most people that are buying a perl site are actually doing things with it and the vast majority of people that paid for the PHP site either have a static splash page or no page at all and just don't bother calling up and canceling the $2.00/month fee for that idea they had in 2009. There's 188 million active domains. 188 million. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/07/02/july-2013-web-server-survey.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/07/02/july-2013-web-s... ... if took any skill to buy a domain and pay $2.00 a month for hosting, godaddy would have been out of business a long time ago. [1] I like that facetubebay.com is actually registered - and by the owner of a restaurant chain (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/richard-makinadjian/6/b26/477 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/richard-makinadjian/6/b26/477), how fitting.
  - pallandt 13y ago
    Perl too 'niche', Ruby too new at the time I would presume, but pretty much every host supported/had to support PHP, if we're making abstraction of another niche, ASP/ASP.NET. However, if I remember correctly, PHP plans were always cheaper than anything else.
    - btilly 13y ago
      Actually in the late 90s, Perl was not niche. If you wanted to be on the web, you needed Perl. That is why Microsoft paid to have the original windows port done - they had no hope of competing in the web server market unless they could run Perl on Windows!
  - chc 13y ago
    You could get "good enough" support for PHP just by turning on mod_php. PHP was literally made for this. It was a little more work for hosts to get the same out of Perl or Python or Ruby.
    - btilly 13y ago
jacques_chester 13y ago
Wordpress had the right product at the right time with the right message. There were other PHP blog systems. And Movable Type was, for a while, the undisputed king. Then the great GPL kerfuffle happened. Wordpress had a pretty site and Matt Mullenweg was proactive in seeking out high profile bloggers and getting them to convert. Add in PHP's ease of installation and the favourable situation for hosts (mod_php is closer to shared-nothing than mod_perl), and I guess it was inevitable. At this point it's network effects and path dependence that keeps it at the top.
- ereckers 13y ago
  I don't see network effects or path dependence keeping it at the top. In fact its share of the universe of free open source CMS installs, has I believe been increasing in recent years. I think there is a shared experience out there that when you put it up against alternatives such as Joomla, Drupal, ModX, and to some extent even Magento that it's the only CMS you can ship to a client without having to field calls all day on how to use the thing. Plus, the ease of simple templating and plugins available allow small shops to deliver products with which they can actually make a profit. I believe this reason alone is a big driver of WordPress recommendations. I'll also mention that my comment is from the point of view of design shops, contractors, and freelancers. If someone is building, maintaing or planning a free standing product website that will have engineering resources dedicated to it then yes, there are probably better alternatives.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    Wordpress is not a general purpose CMS and requires no configuration out of the box to do its basic task: publish a blog. It's a different genre of application from Drupal, Joomla et al, so they can't really be compared. The in-genre competitors are systems like Habari, TextPattern or Serendipity. Nobody uses them. Why? Because nobody uses them. Tell me again about how it's not network effects or path dependency.
    - mgkimsal 13y ago
      well, some people don't use them because there's a limited ecosystem of plugins and themes. While some people might say "i wouldn't use X because no one uses it", most people I know who make those decisions aren't as general, and will specifically point to themes/plugins/books and community support as the reasons to choose one tool over another. Those are the net effects of having a large network of users, hence the network effect you point out (and I agree with). Just people I know and meet won't be so general in their rationalization.
shaneofalltrad 13y ago
For one thing, if you go on google trends, you are basing this on someone doing a search. Chances are, this being a user friendly CMS, "WordPress" will be in the search. While if someone using a more complex PHP framework, they might look for OOP searches or simply cURL and such. I have used google trends to decide on my future projects and found it a bit deceiving. Though I must say, Wordpress has done well and fits a niche from total noob to advanced programmer.
joemaller1 13y ago
So we're wrong to wish for WordPress to adopt PSR standards instead of their own idiosyncratic coding style? I really like PSR compliant PHP code (it's almost PEP 8-ish), the WordPress standards are frustratingly opposite on some key concepts (braces, indentation). But WP is so popular, I don't see how this might ever be resolved. https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards/blob/master/accepted/PSR-2-coding-style-guide.md https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards/blob/master/accepte... http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/coding-standards/php/ http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/coding-standards/php...
- stephenr 13y ago
  Code style is the least of Wordpress' faults. Completely fucking insane architecture (or lack thereof) and ridiculous use of the database should be much higher concerns
  - maratd 13y ago
    > Completely fucking insane architecture (or lack thereof) Lack thereof. Grep is your friend when dealing with anything internal-WordPress-related. I charge extra whenever I have to dive in.
    - stephenr 13y ago
      I find simply refusing to work on WordPress projects is a simpler solution.
jwatte 13y ago
PHP was popular way before Wordpress. I remember working on sites upgrading to php3 (with the file extension php3 no less!)
- Spooky23 13y ago
  You're an old grey beard now to the kids who think about php.
- maratd 13y ago
  > I remember working on sites upgrading to php3 (with the file extension php3 no less!) And I remember renaming all those .php3 files to .php when upgrading to php4. Thanks a lot! =)
lmeyerov 13y ago
No, based on the data, the more reasonable hypothesis is that WordPress is killing PHP: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=wordpress%2C+php#q=wordpress%2C%20php&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=wordpress%2C+php#q=wo...
luisehk 13y ago
Actually, phpBB and phpnuke did.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  Oh man, I remember PHP-Nuke! One massive switch statement. My first introduction into coding anything beyond HTML, believe it or not...
elchief 13y ago
Wordpress is Wordpress because it's Wordpress. Your dumb-ass boss can use it. It has 100x more, prettier, themes than everyone else. It has 100x more devs than anyone else. Related: my buddy still makes $30,000 a month off a plugin he wrote 3 years ago.
- brass9 13y ago
  Out of curiosity, which plugin, may I ask?
- onedev 13y ago
  Out of curiosity could someone still do that in today's landscape?
  - dangrossman 13y ago
    Yes, many people do. There are 68 million active WordPress sites out there. That's a huge market, and there are so many things people pay for on other platforms that you can bring to WordPress and sell there as well.
pushkargaikwad 13y ago
WP didn't made php popular as it was already #1 choice for entry level web developers and had active helpful community (all webmaster forums had a php or similar section), something which other languages lacked. Wordpress became huge because it is modular, plug and play and the go to choice for beginners. Not to mention, it is also a huge marketplace and tens of thousands of people make money creating themes, PSD, custom design, plugins etc.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Just as a warning: Manuel Lemos is the most clueless and destructive clown in the entire PHP community. PHPclasses is a collection of worst practices and anti-patterns. Nothing he writes is in any way plausible, it's all just a feeble attempt at arguing that any engineering practice he can't wrap his head around is wrong. The man is just desperately trying to defend his limited understanding of software development. Excuse the ad hominem, but there's really zero plausible content to this, or any other of the delusional utterings he has published over the last decade.
- h2s 13y ago
  I agree in as much as I think that PHPClasses is an anachronistic throwback to the bad old days of PHP. It has a shameful history of promoting terrible code with dubious "awards" as if it were the greatest thing ever built. Newcomers to PHP development would be better served by a web that lacked phpclasses.org in its current form. For example, in a recent article entitled "26 Ways to Show that PHP Can Be Better Than PHP" (http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/203-26-Ways-to-Show-that-PHP-Can-Be-Better-Than-PHP.html http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/203-26-Ways-to-Show-that...), they showcased a series of "multithreading" implementations in ascending order of WTF, culminating with this: Mohammed Yousef from Egypt has written the PHP Threader class that also takes advantage of the fact that a Web server can run multiple scripts in parallel, except that it uses AJAX requests sent from the browser to start the scripts. I disagree, however, with the idea that Manuel Lemos is a clueless, destructive clown. I think he's a well-meaning, intelligent person who has somewhat failed to keep pace with the "proper software engineering" standards that have infiltrated PHP in recent years. For example, in an article from 2013 comparing development using Wordpress vs using a framework, I would have expected some comparison of the viability of automated testing in each approach. And unless my name was Fabien Potencier, I would not expect to be advised to "use your own framework if you have a good capable framework to address your needs". But this is only destructive to the extent that others fail to make a strong case for building well-tested software using high quality open source libraries where suitable instead of endlessly reinventing wheels. There is room for competing ideas, and I don't see these particular ideas as an especially worrying competitive threat.
shire 13y ago
I think the title means PHP made WordPress popular at least back in the days

31 points by lkrubner 13y ago

Comparing Google Trends for WordPress - which has a multi-million blog network as part of the results - against framework names seems to have some pretty significant issues. PHP was already popular and widely available when WordPress became popular. WordPress benefited from that - it was much easier to install and find hosting versus the then-leader MovableType.

krapp 13y ago
Its being better than Movable Type is the only reason I ever switched to Wordpress.

PBxdId7wFr 13y ago

PHP suck! 8===D~

grumps 13y ago

This is just a bunch of self righteous crap. blah blah blah "WordPress is awesome..."

dictum 13y ago

WordPress benefited from the fact that PHP hosting was always cheaper (even free) than hosts that supported Perl or Python (this was a little before Ruby became popular through Rails). You could find oversold hosting plans for as little as $1,99/mo. As ceejayoz mentioned, PHP was already popular before WP. Arguably, forum software written in PHP made PHP popular before b2/cafelog (WP's predecessor) appeared.

nonchalance 13y ago
> WordPress benefited from the fact that PHP hosting was always cheaper (even free) than hosts that supported Perl or Python (this was a little before Ruby became popular through Rails). You could find oversold hosting plans for as little as $1,99/mo. Why was/is that the case?
- kristopolous 13y ago
  I'm guessing it's the "oversold" portion. There's probably quite a few "idea people" out there that are paying the monthly fee for their facetubebay[1] idea and are just looking for the right technical team to work for the equity. Really. I bet most people that are buying a perl site are actually doing things with it and the vast majority of people that paid for the PHP site either have a static splash page or no page at all and just don't bother calling up and canceling the $2.00/month fee for that idea they had in 2009. There's 188 million active domains. 188 million. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/07/02/july-2013-web-server-survey.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/07/02/july-2013-web-s... ... if took any skill to buy a domain and pay $2.00 a month for hosting, godaddy would have been out of business a long time ago. [1] I like that facetubebay.com is actually registered - and by the owner of a restaurant chain (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/richard-makinadjian/6/b26/477 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/richard-makinadjian/6/b26/477), how fitting.
- pallandt 13y ago
  Perl too 'niche', Ruby too new at the time I would presume, but pretty much every host supported/had to support PHP, if we're making abstraction of another niche, ASP/ASP.NET. However, if I remember correctly, PHP plans were always cheaper than anything else.
  - btilly 13y ago
    Actually in the late 90s, Perl was not niche. If you wanted to be on the web, you needed Perl. That is why Microsoft paid to have the original windows port done - they had no hope of competing in the web server market unless they could run Perl on Windows!
- chc 13y ago
  You could get "good enough" support for PHP just by turning on mod_php. PHP was literally made for this. It was a little more work for hosts to get the same out of Perl or Python or Ruby.
  - btilly 13y ago

jacques_chester 13y ago

Wordpress had the right product at the right time with the right message. There were other PHP blog systems. And Movable Type was, for a while, the undisputed king. Then the great GPL kerfuffle happened. Wordpress had a pretty site and Matt Mullenweg was proactive in seeking out high profile bloggers and getting them to convert. Add in PHP's ease of installation and the favourable situation for hosts (mod_php is closer to shared-nothing than mod_perl), and I guess it was inevitable. At this point it's network effects and path dependence that keeps it at the top.

ereckers 13y ago
I don't see network effects or path dependence keeping it at the top. In fact its share of the universe of free open source CMS installs, has I believe been increasing in recent years. I think there is a shared experience out there that when you put it up against alternatives such as Joomla, Drupal, ModX, and to some extent even Magento that it's the only CMS you can ship to a client without having to field calls all day on how to use the thing. Plus, the ease of simple templating and plugins available allow small shops to deliver products with which they can actually make a profit. I believe this reason alone is a big driver of WordPress recommendations. I'll also mention that my comment is from the point of view of design shops, contractors, and freelancers. If someone is building, maintaing or planning a free standing product website that will have engineering resources dedicated to it then yes, there are probably better alternatives.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  Wordpress is not a general purpose CMS and requires no configuration out of the box to do its basic task: publish a blog. It's a different genre of application from Drupal, Joomla et al, so they can't really be compared. The in-genre competitors are systems like Habari, TextPattern or Serendipity. Nobody uses them. Why? Because nobody uses them. Tell me again about how it's not network effects or path dependency.
  - mgkimsal 13y ago
    well, some people don't use them because there's a limited ecosystem of plugins and themes. While some people might say "i wouldn't use X because no one uses it", most people I know who make those decisions aren't as general, and will specifically point to themes/plugins/books and community support as the reasons to choose one tool over another. Those are the net effects of having a large network of users, hence the network effect you point out (and I agree with). Just people I know and meet won't be so general in their rationalization.

shaneofalltrad 13y ago

For one thing, if you go on google trends, you are basing this on someone doing a search. Chances are, this being a user friendly CMS, "WordPress" will be in the search. While if someone using a more complex PHP framework, they might look for OOP searches or simply cURL and such. I have used google trends to decide on my future projects and found it a bit deceiving. Though I must say, Wordpress has done well and fits a niche from total noob to advanced programmer.

joemaller1 13y ago

So we're wrong to wish for WordPress to adopt PSR standards instead of their own idiosyncratic coding style? I really like PSR compliant PHP code (it's almost PEP 8-ish), the WordPress standards are frustratingly opposite on some key concepts (braces, indentation). But WP is so popular, I don't see how this might ever be resolved. https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards/blob/master/accepted/PSR-2-coding-style-guide.md https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards/blob/master/accepte... http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/coding-standards/php/ http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/coding-standards/php...

stephenr 13y ago
Code style is the least of Wordpress' faults. Completely fucking insane architecture (or lack thereof) and ridiculous use of the database should be much higher concerns
- maratd 13y ago
  > Completely fucking insane architecture (or lack thereof) Lack thereof. Grep is your friend when dealing with anything internal-WordPress-related. I charge extra whenever I have to dive in.
  - stephenr 13y ago
    I find simply refusing to work on WordPress projects is a simpler solution.

jwatte 13y ago

PHP was popular way before Wordpress. I remember working on sites upgrading to php3 (with the file extension php3 no less!)

Spooky23 13y ago
You're an old grey beard now to the kids who think about php.
maratd 13y ago
> I remember working on sites upgrading to php3 (with the file extension php3 no less!) And I remember renaming all those .php3 files to .php when upgrading to php4. Thanks a lot! =)

lmeyerov 13y ago

No, based on the data, the more reasonable hypothesis is that WordPress is killing PHP: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=wordpress%2C+php#q=wordpress%2C%20php&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=wordpress%2C+php#q=wo...

luisehk 13y ago

Actually, phpBB and phpnuke did.

ceejayoz 13y ago
Oh man, I remember PHP-Nuke! One massive switch statement. My first introduction into coding anything beyond HTML, believe it or not...

elchief 13y ago

Wordpress is Wordpress because it's Wordpress. Your dumb-ass boss can use it. It has 100x more, prettier, themes than everyone else. It has 100x more devs than anyone else. Related: my buddy still makes $30,000 a month off a plugin he wrote 3 years ago.

brass9 13y ago
Out of curiosity, which plugin, may I ask?
onedev 13y ago
Out of curiosity could someone still do that in today's landscape?
- dangrossman 13y ago
  Yes, many people do. There are 68 million active WordPress sites out there. That's a huge market, and there are so many things people pay for on other platforms that you can bring to WordPress and sell there as well.

pushkargaikwad 13y ago

WP didn't made php popular as it was already #1 choice for entry level web developers and had active helpful community (all webmaster forums had a php or similar section), something which other languages lacked. Wordpress became huge because it is modular, plug and play and the go to choice for beginners. Not to mention, it is also a huge marketplace and tens of thousands of people make money creating themes, PSD, custom design, plugins etc.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

Just as a warning: Manuel Lemos is the most clueless and destructive clown in the entire PHP community. PHPclasses is a collection of worst practices and anti-patterns. Nothing he writes is in any way plausible, it's all just a feeble attempt at arguing that any engineering practice he can't wrap his head around is wrong. The man is just desperately trying to defend his limited understanding of software development. Excuse the ad hominem, but there's really zero plausible content to this, or any other of the delusional utterings he has published over the last decade.

h2s 13y ago
I agree in as much as I think that PHPClasses is an anachronistic throwback to the bad old days of PHP. It has a shameful history of promoting terrible code with dubious "awards" as if it were the greatest thing ever built. Newcomers to PHP development would be better served by a web that lacked phpclasses.org in its current form. For example, in a recent article entitled "26 Ways to Show that PHP Can Be Better Than PHP" (http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/203-26-Ways-to-Show-that-PHP-Can-Be-Better-Than-PHP.html http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/203-26-Ways-to-Show-that...), they showcased a series of "multithreading" implementations in ascending order of WTF, culminating with this: Mohammed Yousef from Egypt has written the PHP Threader class that also takes advantage of the fact that a Web server can run multiple scripts in parallel, except that it uses AJAX requests sent from the browser to start the scripts. I disagree, however, with the idea that Manuel Lemos is a clueless, destructive clown. I think he's a well-meaning, intelligent person who has somewhat failed to keep pace with the "proper software engineering" standards that have infiltrated PHP in recent years. For example, in an article from 2013 comparing development using Wordpress vs using a framework, I would have expected some comparison of the viability of automated testing in each approach. And unless my name was Fabien Potencier, I would not expect to be advised to "use your own framework if you have a good capable framework to address your needs". But this is only destructive to the extent that others fail to make a strong case for building well-tested software using high quality open source libraries where suitable instead of endlessly reinventing wheels. There is room for competing ideas, and I don't see these particular ideas as an especially worrying competitive threat.

shire 13y ago

I think the title means PHP made WordPress popular at least back in the days