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Comment by nashashmi | Hacker News Reader

If you were to look at all those times that PHP is cursed either for its speed or programming or something else, I am surprised these big websites are still investing in something so buggy.

Btw, I'm a PHP developer.

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Throw enough caching at a speed problem, and the speed problem effectively goes away. This is why the terms "Varnish" and "fcgi_cache" are so well associated with WordPress installs.

I'm not sure I agree with this — it just becomes much more complex and harder to debug!

You are absolutely correct - caching solves the apparent speed problem to the end user, not the underlying cause of the speed problem. That said, solving the apparent speed problem for the end user is frequently enough.

As a PHP developer who has worked on several Wordpress installs as a freelancer, I can assure you companies don't invest in Wordpress because they're interested in security or speed, but so they can pay as little for the development and maintenance as possible.

WordPress is also very popular among content folks, on account of its well, content management features. Not to mention the strength of the editor, and easy extensibility. You could tap away in your terminal for a year making the new and best node.js or Go editor and by the time you were done you wouldn't be close, and WP would have moved the goalposts again. And let's say you were successful and had created a great content management system. Then you'd have to train your editors and your social media folks and they'd STILL hate it and quit and you'd have to train a new batch of editors, except, oh, you just got the opportunity to work for a company that doesn't make you spend a year re-implementing a blog from scratch and jumped on it, and now nobody knows how to get the website to let them embed a Vine? Man we should have just gone with Wordpress.

> Not to mention the strength of the editor

Please, Wordpress content editor is nothing special from a UX stand point. Clients are just used to it,that's why clients ask for Wordpress.

Well, I personally don't want a "special" UX in my editor. In any case just about every WP point upgrade has brought editor enhancements, so if you haven't used it recently you won't have a good basis of comparison. (e.g. 8.1 with distraction free mode – not for me personally but I've seen writers oooh over it.)

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