This is the open question. I myself have wondered why WordPress still hasn't been replaced in any substantial way.

You're imagining this change happening in a world where people still care about Wordpress.

Try imagining instead, a world where Wordpress is already a dead technology that nobody would use for a greenfield project, and it's only "legacy" sites that haven't been modified in 10 years (but which are owned by brick-and-mortar companies that continue faithfully paying the hosting bills every month) that are still hosted on Wordpress.com.

Can you not then see the value in some company buying up Wordpress.com, and migrating its customers over to a Wordpress-compatibility-shim over their own service that's based on a not-dead technology?

wordpress may not, the org deploying it might.

True, but I'm not interested in anything other than a self-hosting solution. Pricing doesn't enter into it.

I resolved my issue and lightened my workload (not to mention gained performance) by ceasing to use Wordpress. That's not to say I don't think people should use WP -- it's just not for me.

I think Wordpress is still going to stay in the game. It still has a road ahead of it. I do think that the big newsrooms are going to expand past it's limiting multiple-people collaboration features into a new CMS, but most blogs will want to use WP.

Sure, but no-one but very technical minded people would pick those instead of just WP. It's just extra complexity which you don't need when you start a blog or a shop or something like that. I would have a hard time defending it unless in very specific situations; wp is just too stable, too many plugins, too many programmers can support it, designers can make templates for it with ease etc, all hosters support it for next to nothing etc and without setup.

This literally never happened, but ok?

> have come to the conclusion that if I actually wanted to do that and wanted to be able to target the same kinds of folks who would otherwise be installing WordPress, I probably need to stick to PHP

I'd agree with that. But plenty of people already doing it, eg. https://craftcms.com

Those people are already served well by things like Wix and Squarespace. WordPress is essentially a point and click application development tool at this point, with integrations for anything imaginable. Yes it is insanely insecure, slow, poorly designed, and bloated. But the depth of offerings from the plugin marketplace will keep WP relevant for a long time to come with people who can't afford custom development.

Isn't WordPress dead or at least dying by now? Its main use case - blog engine for desktop browsers - is much less relevant than was years ago.

You know that WordPress is actually fast, right? A vanilla install on a crappy $2 a month server will return a response in a few ms.

The problem with WordPress are the plugins and the lack of vetting/rules/oversight. And when they do apply their rules, they apply them in ridiculous ways -- for example, I submitted a plugin that was a wrapper around an open source project, with the project's permission, and was denied because I wasn't the author of the project and the author of the project had no desire to interact with shenanigans like that.

These plugins can do virtually anything and do really "bad" (as in performance and security) things.

If you are doing everything in-house and at least reading/contributing to the plugin code before accepting an external plugin, you can host very performant websites.

I'd even venture to suspect that all these plugins is an indication that people want more functionality than can ever be achieved in a competitor ... but to be clear, there are some pretty solid competitors. These competitors are entirely closed-source, so, choose your poison I guess.

> Why don’t we bring the web back to that?

I know people who host an entire school (very niche skill) online. Their entire thing is built on WordPress. I know of quite a few sites actually running their entire user-facing stack on WordPress (usually with a backend API running Go/C# or something). I even know of some very popular money-management apps where the entire app is just running in WordPress.

The internet isn't just static pages, that ship sailed 3+ decades ago.

Yea - I see it as weird too. The only reason I'm still an advocate for WordPress are the self-host-ability/full customization aspects. Otherwise, you're just another Medium that's going to take my data and use it against me.

Honestly, I wouldn't touch this until Automattic publishes the code. To a old-timer who's been leveraging WP for well over a decade: ew.

WordPress is open source software, not a company or platform. No one can stop anyone else from using it, provided they have some sort of hosting.

You may be thinking of WordPress.com, run by Automattic? Disclosure: I work there. :)

How?

Well, they are working on a new feature that will (hopefully) change that. It's called Full Site Editing (FSE), and will basically transform the WordPress editor into a complete website builder that, considering the WordPress's market share, may become a thing. It's arriving next year. Ref: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/20791

This is a great point - I built a website for a club I go to on Hugo and S3, and it is updated by users going to Forestry.io which then posts changes to Github, which then runs a Github Action which compiles it with Hugo and uploads to S3.

I thought users would be able to get their head around it... nope! I'm the only one that can make changes to the website.

It's still been worth it because of how cheap it is to run, and better for the environment than having a server idling to support our static site, but still a pain that I'm stuck being the one person that can update it.

That's the wordpress.org + wordpress.com model. Seems practical enough. Successful even.

Yes. I've been doing it for almost a decade.

I hate Wordpress. But basically, we're going to be stuck with it for a while. Network effects and path dependency cannot be shifted by a technology that is merely a bit better from the POV of commissioning end-users.

Consider: under what circumstances will the thousands of PHP developers who write the tangled cthulucode which underpins Wordpress and its ecosystem drop everything and simultaneously rewrite the core + thousands of plugins + tens of thousands of themes?

Your remarks are wildly wishful thinking. They remind me of "imagine a beowulf cluster".

You'd need to treat WP as if it was a Linux installation - you can install ANY package you want, and there are a zillion packages that instantly to be able to do anything, but if you go postal and install a billion packages, you will have to maintain all of them. Even if WP makes it easier thanks to prioritizing backwards compatibility, its still a task.

But there is no comparison - one day you will need to do something, and Ghost/Substack/Whatever won't have the feature for it. Then, back to WordPress.

Medium is a service, Wordpress is a platform. If you're talking about a replacement for Wordpress.com then you have an argument.

But this submission was regarding the platform/CMS of Wordpress so your argument is apples to oranges.