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Comment by throwaway984393 | Hacker News Reader

Please, for the love of god, let it die. WordPress's horrible security, annoying maintenance, and cookie cutter sites have filled the internet with malware and garbage content. It's so annoying to maintain that we have to find these managed hosting places that provide very little value. And despite them, you still need to add a bunch of extra stuff to make a reliable site. Time to create something modern.

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Let me guess, you are a web programmer?

Because for those of us that are not, WordPress is a pretty easy and pretty capable way to self host something. Without it, lots more stuff would be centralized with Big Tech.

If WordPress didn't exist there would be other blogging software.

WP has emerged as a de facto standard, but there were alternatives before, and there will be alternatives to come.

If you can self-host something, you can run a SSG*-based blog platform (Hugo, Jekyll, etc). And static webpages are even simpler to self-host. If you are willing to bend a little bit for big tech, you can just host them dropping generated files in any S3-like object storage.

*Static Site Generator

> S3-like object storage

They are not web programmers maybe not even in devops. So It is easier to just buy basic shared hosting wit button 'install wordpress' in hosting-admin.

Statically generated site would be better (especially for readers of the site) but they still need some CMS.

...and replace it with what, exactly?

I mean, I liked Drupal, still do, but the business for custom Drupal sites dried up and moved onto WordPress with (insert builder of choice here). Teaching anything on Drupal was like pulling teeth, even in the D7 and D8+ eras. And I'm not aware of any demand for Backdrop / Concrete5 / whatever sites. WordPress even ate up whatever demand there was for Magento (good riddance IMO).

Everyone moved to WordPress because it's easy to teach clients on, the dev costs are reasonable, and there's a really good plugin ecosystem to counter the platform's faults. You can absolutely build unique sites on WordPress and lock them down too.

If WordPress dies, everyone moves to SquareSpace (which is proprietary) or socials (in other words, doesn't have a web presence).

I have some hopes for Drupal's Starshot Initiative. Tho it now bears the crushingly drab sobriquet of "Drupal CMS" :-P

lol 10 years ago I worked with a shop that used expression engine for everything. It was certainly more flexible, more pleasant to write plugins for, and less of a security nightmare at the time.

The community was significantly smaller, but many of the plugins that existed were very well maintained, there was a small but healthy set of developers with paid plugins.

I don't want anything to do with that industry anymore, whenever I want to put up a little site I just use a static site generator (hugo). I think there is an interesting potential market for a wp admin like UI that could be used to create hugo posts/etc and manage the theming configuration. Then you click publish, it fires off a hugo container that generates the static site and updates the host... maybe such a thing exists.

>Time to create something modern.

The track record of "modern" would suggest Wordpress is the second coming of Jesus, so no thanks. Wordpress is fine compared to "modern" software.

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