3 ms·

Just goes to show you that many startups are really focused on the wrong things. Users don't care about your development practices, the quality of your codebas

Just goes to show you that many startups are really focused on the wrong things. Users don't care about your development practices, the quality of your codebase, or pretty much anything that happens under the hood. They just want something that works, is easy to understand and use, and does what they need it to. Wordpress fits all those, hence the huge community of loyal fans.

mdasen 17y ago
I'd argue that it's more a lack of options/timing. MovableType was once big and then they offended the community which saw an exodus, mostly to WordPress. WordPress was really they only equivalent back then. Even today, there aren't a lot of options. Typo (on Rails) wasn't well maintained for a while and many cheap hosts still don't play that well with Ruby/Rails. There are a few Python blogs (and more than a few use Django), but again many hosts don't support Python well. WordPress really has that thousands of monkeys banging on a keyboard thing going for it. There are just so many users who have created little plugins. Most of WordPress might be crap, but no one wants to spend time on something of such low-value (code-wise) as a blog and WordPress meets most needs. It's slow, it has poor security, its interface leaves a lot to be desired (keeps getting more complicated in my opinion), but it works well enough. Just look at the options. You can run MovableType in its Perl/PHP comboness. You can run an under-featured Python blog based off one of those many frameworks and then get annoyed that there isn't anti-spam protection. You could try a Rails blog like Typo or Mephisto, but you have to deal with getting a host that supports Ruby well (no problem for me, but definitely for many). And Typo never seems to quite keep pace with Rails. Users do care about elegance. It's just that elegance is sometimes not built (like the number of Django blogs that are missing even simple things that you don't notice at first) or just don't see the type of life that WordPress has because they came later. WordPress is elegant enough for most people while other solutions have deal-breakers in them for many people.
- decode 17y ago
  It seems like what you're really saying is, "There are a whole bunch of options out there for blogs, but WordPress is the best for almost everyone." I would agree with that statement, and I suspect that's why it's been so successful.

mdasen 17y ago

I'd argue that it's more a lack of options/timing. MovableType was once big and then they offended the community which saw an exodus, mostly to WordPress. WordPress was really they only equivalent back then. Even today, there aren't a lot of options. Typo (on Rails) wasn't well maintained for a while and many cheap hosts still don't play that well with Ruby/Rails. There are a few Python blogs (and more than a few use Django), but again many hosts don't support Python well. WordPress really has that thousands of monkeys banging on a keyboard thing going for it. There are just so many users who have created little plugins. Most of WordPress might be crap, but no one wants to spend time on something of such low-value (code-wise) as a blog and WordPress meets most needs. It's slow, it has poor security, its interface leaves a lot to be desired (keeps getting more complicated in my opinion), but it works well enough. Just look at the options. You can run MovableType in its Perl/PHP comboness. You can run an under-featured Python blog based off one of those many frameworks and then get annoyed that there isn't anti-spam protection. You could try a Rails blog like Typo or Mephisto, but you have to deal with getting a host that supports Ruby well (no problem for me, but definitely for many). And Typo never seems to quite keep pace with Rails. Users do care about elegance. It's just that elegance is sometimes not built (like the number of Django blogs that are missing even simple things that you don't notice at first) or just don't see the type of life that WordPress has because they came later. WordPress is elegant enough for most people while other solutions have deal-breakers in them for many people.

decode 17y ago
It seems like what you're really saying is, "There are a whole bunch of options out there for blogs, but WordPress is the best for almost everyone." I would agree with that statement, and I suspect that's why it's been so successful.