
Ask HN: Why has nobody built a better Wordpress? - aml183
Wordpress is terrible. CMS as a whole is bad. Why has no one built a better one? I know people have tried, but why lack of traction?
======
krapp
Wordpress is terrible, but none of the ways in which it's terrible matter.

From the point of view of the user, Wordpress is incredibly simple and
intuitive. Don't underestimate how important it is for the average user to
_never see a terminal, and rarely if ever see the source code,_ for the
application to feel comfortable to people most familiar with Windows
applications and web forms. Anything more technical than that is intimidating.

Most people who use Wordpress aren't programmers, don't want to be
programmers, and don't want to hire programmers to get their site up and
running. The simplicity of installing new plugins and themes is far more
important than the quality of the code.

~~~
akg_67
Well said. I believe most programmers overlook the business utility of the
product. You can have the product with the best quality code but users are not
going to adopt it unless it solves their business problems. Code quality has
nothing to do with the user acceptance of the product. With the entrenchment
of WP in CMS space, OP is unlikely to unseat WP by rewriting the WP with the
best possible code quality.

A few years ago, while searching for a development role, I was rejected by
couple of people at a company with feedback that my code sample was not of
good quality. Later I got the chuckle when I noticed the same people
subscribed (paid) to my service that uses the provided code sample.

~~~
dr_hercules
With respect to a software like Wordpress which is:

\- huge and powerful

\- vividly maintained and extended by lots of developers

\- rarely features security issues which aren't fixed immediately

... the question arises whether the quality of its code base is in this case
maybe rather an _academic_ issue.

~~~
liviu-
>\- rarely features security issues which aren't fixed immediately

I tried to use WordPress once. I downloaded a theme from wordpress.org with
the assumption that themes are reviewed before making there. Nevertheless, I
did some basic pentesting before putting my app live, and I quickly found a
XSS vulnerability in the search bar of the theme (their paid version featured
the same vulnerability). Maybe my experience is not to be generalised to
WordPress in general, but it put me off.

~~~
dr_hercules
> Maybe my experience is not to be generalised to WordPress in general, but it
> put me off.

WordPress plug ins are - as far as I know - not reviewed. You're at the mercy
of the respective developer.

~~~
liviu-
They are, as this link seem to indicate:
[https://wordpress.org/plugins/add/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/add/)

>Currently there are 224 plugins in the review queue, 198 of which are
awaiting their initial review.

~~~
dr_hercules
There are more than 38k plug ins available
([https://en.wordpress.org/plugins/](https://en.wordpress.org/plugins/)). And
also from what I have seen so far - there is no extensive (if any) reviewing
done regarding safety and quality.

------
alexpatin
This is my first HN comment - I must be the only WP developer who reads Hacker
News or something. Let me preface this by saying I'm not going to be repeating
what's already been said about non-technical user friendliness.

WordPress was my gateway in 2008-9 to web development. back when I was still a
graphic design student. I started off hacking away at themes with my
_extremely_ limited HTML / CSS / PHP knowledge back then. Shit, my Google-fu
was't really even halfway decent then.

Today, thanks to the large community of developers working on the core
WordPress project every day, and the sheer number of bug fixes, security
updates, and new features that get added with each release -- there's
absolutely nothing to compare it to. It runs nearly a quarter of the entire
internet.

And now, with the upcoming release of the JSON REST API as a part of core,
developers will be able to take advantage of using WP as a data backend (read:
users still control their content), while using the API to build applications
with modern tech like React or Angular.

Just my two satoshis.

Edit: I'd also like to point out that several (not all) hacks come from
popular themes and plugins that are created by 3rd party authors / sources.
Some of these are not available on the wordpress.org theme and plugin
repositories, and usually this is due to not following certain standards. I
would blame most successful hacks on brute force attempts against sites with
admins who leave their username as the default admin and have incredibly weak
passwords. I would also venture to say most of these hacks come from through
exploits in third party code or out of date code, which users often fail to
update.

~~~
snowwrestler
IMO there is no excuse for the lack of login rate limiting in Wordpress core.
Drupal has had this for years and it causes no usability problems at all,
while making it almost impossible to brute-force an admin session. It just
boggles my mind that it takes a plugin to provide this basic protection on WP.

------
nnain
> Wordpress is terrible

That's open to debate. I have 3 websites running on Wordpress, I don't have
the intent to use anything else. It's simple and comes with batteries
attached, especially for people who aren't hacking the code themselves. The
plugins/themes are a big plus and so is the community. In what way is it
terrible? Have you used it enough?

> CMS as a whole is bad

No. CMSes serve a purpose and serve it well. Btw, TechCrunch, Fortune.com run
on Wordpress too.

> Why has no one built a better one?

There are a lot of other CMSes. Different names of course, Drupal, Joomla,
Django-CMS. Different languages too.

> Why lack of traction?

There's enough traction... Updates to the core/themes/plugins are frequent.
There are a lot of performance updates coming up, along with PHP7 and HHVM,
which will speed things in general.

~~~
agumonkey
What's your background ? WP was a mental burden to me. Imperative loops and
hooks, too fragile to my tastes (OOP freshman, Lisp/FP head), unless you know
the house by heart.

Also, WP plugins can be monstrosities of cosmic scales. An pure exercise in
delegation.

~~~
gvb
You are looking at the implementation. Most people are _using_ it, not trying
to extend it. As noted by many others, WP is popular because it gets the job
done for the _users_ in a "worst is better" sort of way.

[http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-
better.html)

~~~
agumonkey
Indeed, this was a dev POV. I understand the appeal for 'userspace', WP is
mainstream, big numbers are reassuring, and you can always find someone to fix
issues (you shouldn't have) or at least make you feel like things are
possible.

------
jonathaneunice
1) Superior installability (and in recent releases, update-ability). This
doesn't preclude others from making something better, but WP makes incredible
ease of installation/deployment (including of themes, plugins, updates, etc.)
"table stakes." That's a genuine "barrier to market entry" for any contender.
IME, nothing else comes close to WP installability. There are some glitches
around updates (esp. if themes and such have been customized), but updates are
also increasingly smooth/automatic.

2) Momentum, inertia, market position, "path dependence," installed base, and
community. Also not a show-stopper for those wishing to improve on WP
technically, but a huge hurdle to cross for anyone wishing to encourage
investment in alternatives. Large user bases create virtuous cycles of
investment and improvement that fix previously broken things. Sure, it may not
always be pretty, but WP now how has WYSIWYG editors, versioning, increasingly
automated updates, ever improving admin features, and many other things that
were _hopeless_ in previous versions.

3) LCD. WP works on virtually all platforms, and is a credible lowest common
denominator in terms of technology used (PHP, MySQL) and breadth of support.
There have been some attempts to ramp up alternatives, but they often require
one to use Ruby on Rails, Python and Django, or other less-LCD tech.

4) Chicken and egg problem. I have no doubt that at some point another
CMS/publishing platform will arise to supersede WP. It's the nature of tech
things. It's unlikely we'll all be using WP in 2025 or 2045. But as a
developer who definitely wants a more elegant, extensible CMS platform, and
who has the tech skills to jump languages and environments, I've never found a
better alternative to invest in/build on. There are frameworks like Rails,
Flask, Django, Meteor, etc. we might use for custom apps. But a built-out,
reasonably-supported, rich CMS / web publishing environment? I haven't found
an alternative I can credibly present to customers, co-developers, and
designers as an up-and-coming, likable, very-likely-to-succeed platform we
should build on. Linux over historical Unix, nginx over Apache, or Go over C
or C++? Sure. There is no general-purpose X I could broadly recommend over
WordPress.

~~~
jonathaneunice
Btw, if you'd like to see what a legitimate attempt to improve on WP looks
like, check out Bolt: [https://bolt.cm](https://bolt.cm)

Strong framework, component based, lots of basic features, looks and operates
a lot like WP. But, much harder to install than WP, less featured (esp. when
common plugins are considered), vastly smaller community and supporting base
of plugins and themes, yadda yadda.

~~~
Giorgi
aka: useless.

~~~
jonathaneunice
Not useless--but certainly much closer to that end of the spectrum than WP's
"runs a good chunk of the entire Web." Its strong underpinnings
notwithstanding.

------
marpstar
WordPress may be terrible for us developers who are trying to hack on it, but
the Admin area for WordPress is stupid easy for how much functionality it
contains.

Tens of thousands of plugins to do almost anything you could possibly ever
need to do. When you're building websites for a client on a budget, the
availability of plugins goes a long way.

------
brianwawok
Few thoughts.

1) It's "good enough". Sure it is slow. Sure it is kind of buggy. Sure it gets
hacked a lot. But at the end of the day, it mostly works. Harder to disrupt
something that mostly works.

2) Traction. It has 1000s of plugins and themes. To get big, someone else
would need a lot of plugins and themes. But no one will make plugins and
themes for someone that is not big.

3) ease of use. I know a lot of people that WP admin and make WP websites for
a living. They are not technical in the programmer sense (although some can
hack a little PHP). They don't really want to have a giant MVC architecture
with DAOs and Angular and Node.js and blah blah blah. They just want to throw
up a blog like website.

------
marcofloriano
I work teaching Wordpress (and other CMSs) and i can assure you that Wordpress
is the best option available for less savvy users (no programmers looking for
a professional website). To this kind of users your statement (Wordpress is
terrible) don´t make any sense. Actually Wordpress have an amazing ecosystem
(maybe the best) for normal people (like lawyers, salespersons, housewives,
and so on) who wants to learn (fast) how to create a professional website
(something beyond Wix, for example).

~~~
therealmarv
totally agree on that. I've seen so many people which are non programmers but
they can somehow customize Wordpress. Is not that incredible... people using
and maintaining a software without beeing a programmer? (For the record I also
dislike PHP and many Wordpress internals).

------
anaethelion
We've talked several times with my colleagues about this, and we ended up
writing things down : [http://makina-corpus.com/blog/metier/2014/why-cms-will-
not-d...](http://makina-corpus.com/blog/metier/2014/why-cms-will-not-die)

TL;DR : The sheer amount of work to get at least to the level expected by the
users outweights most motivations. Maybe one day someone will come with a way
better solution, one which Wordpress cannot cope with. And then, we will have
another cycle. ;)

------
bobbytherobot
The simplest answer is many other CMSes try to solve the wrong problems. Many
to try scratch the itch of a dogmatic programmer instead of a content
generator. In the end, most end users aren't programmers.

------
acomjean
Maintenance.

If you have a small business that needs a site, but your not savy to do it
yourself, you ask a developer to build you a wordpress site. You know that
even if said developer is gone in a few years, enough people know wordpress
that it can be maintained..

------
nailer
Isn't that what Ghost is aiming for? It's beautiful, has a great writing
experience, is Open Source just like Wordpress, cheap hosting, and is working
on expanding it's plugin ecosystem.

[https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)

~~~
gramakri
No oauth or ldap integration. And they don't want to do it either.

~~~
nailer
Right now I'm sure there's other things that take higher priority they need to
get out the door. LDAP in particular would be much later in their product
development cycle.

------
cheald
People have been writing "Wordpress replacements" forever. Writing a new blog
engine is practically a rite of passage for a web developer; the problem is
that nobody has yet produced one which is as easy to deploy, configure, and
maintain.

Even if they did manage to, they'd have a massive amount of momentum to
overcome in the form of the theme and plugin communities; there is so much
turnkey extensibility available (for better or worse) that it comes with an
awful lot of end-user value baked in out of the box.

Wordpress is slow, and its plugin/theme architecture breeds security holes
like nobody's business, but that doesn't matter to your average user who does
90 pageviews/month and doesn't care about security until they actually get
attacked.

------
therealmarv
It's not about Wordpress it's about their plugin system and themes. You cannot
copy that universe surrounding Wordpress. Maybe one which is close in basic
functionality is Ghost
[https://github.com/TryGhost](https://github.com/TryGhost) but again... it is
missing functionality. One thing which is interesting is replacing the motor
which runs Wordpress (like FB has done) with HipHop VM to have JIT/compiled
sourcecode. Example: [https://www.flockport.com/deploy-wordpress-with-hhvm-
and-php...](https://www.flockport.com/deploy-wordpress-with-hhvm-and-php-fpm-
as-fallback/)

------
confiscate
Well, it's definitely possible if executed correctly. It's certainly not
impossible. It's just not as easy as it sounds, but there's an opportunity
there to execute correctly

------
nationcrafting
Like others here, I don't think WP is terrible if you look at it through the
eyes of their typical users.

I also disagree that nobody is building a better WP: I recently started
working with Webflow, which is very good, quite powerful, and writes very
clean code (better than most developers could write themselves).

And, on a more wysiwyg level, there are plenty of new companies like
Squarespace offering a service targeting the same user-base as WP.

------
ilaksh
Wordpress is not terrible. People have made systems that improve on it though.
Those systems just haven't been widely adopted because Wordpress has too much
momentum, plugins for everything, etc.

People often confuse popularity with merit. All of the popular systems are
technically obsolete. Mainly we are waiting for people to catch up.

------
morgante
There's tremendous inertia. Lots of bloggers have learned it and many of them
are not technically proficient. Hence, it's an extreme uphill battle trying to
get non-technical people to learn a new system.

And because WordPress isn't bad _enough_ , none of the bloggers will learn.

------
powatom
Building anything that rivals Wordpress in terms of features, extensibility
and ease of use is a massive undertaking.

Building a CMS is relatively easy.

Building a CMS that does everything WP does is difficult.

Building a CMS that does everything WP does whilst still remaining easy to use
is _incredibly_ difficult.

There are plenty of blog alternatives out there - but few that you can turn
into virtually any other kind of system in just a few clicks. WP can be turned
into a whole host of other 'types' of website and you don't need to know
anything particularly technical in order to do it.

Even installing Wordpress itself is just a few clicks (depending on your
hosting provider).

WP is terrible in lots of ways, but in the ways that most people care about,
it does a reasonable-to-good job.

------
smcnally
I disagree with the question's premise. Most of the "terrible" referenced is
likely in code outside WP's core. There's cruft in in core; rectifying that's
an ongoing process. With CMS tech, I've seen even smart developers
consistently underestimate the difficulty and time involved in building
subsystems like user access controls, document revisioning, media asset
handling. There's decent separation of logic, content, and presentation.
There's a huge community of users and developers. And the principals are
serious about Free Software. None of these things are easily replicable.

------
mattmurdog
Wordpress single handedly provided jobs for thousands of web developers. It's
a fantastic CMS and no one has built a better one the same way no one has
"tried" to rebuilt a "better" Google or Facebook.

------
callmevlad
> CMS as a whole is bad. Why has no one built a better one?

In the next few months that's going to change dramatically. Shoot me an email
to vlad@webflow.com for a demo if you're curious.

------
Giorgi
Same reason why nobody has built a better Google.

PHP is not terrible, Wordpress is not terrible. It's just you, trying to be
"different".

------
Mandatum
They have. In the form of either blogs platforms, frameworks or ecommerce
platforms.

Wordpress as a blog platform is still OK (personally not my cup of tea) and as
a simple CMS is "OK", but it tries to do too much.

Enterprise-level websites running on Wordpress with shopping carts, customized
ordering systems, etc are hacky as hell.

------
stickershock
Maybe they have?

Perch
[http://grabaperch.com/products/perch](http://grabaperch.com/products/perch)

Craft [https://buildwithcraft.com](https://buildwithcraft.com)

~~~
jlahijani
ProcessWire: [http://processwire.com/](http://processwire.com/)

------
joshguthrie
Because all these features come at a price.

If you can see why wordpress is terrible, you don't need it and can easily
whip out your own replacement.

If you can't see why it's terrible, then it's the perfect product for you.

------
NicoJuicy
Why would Wordpress be terrible? I use it a lot for fast web development for
clients. They don't pay much and i get the job done reasonably fast...

Everyone wins, because it gets the job done.

------
johansch
The people who have have done so charge money for their stuff.

------
VeejayRampay
I guess the TL;DR is: Sure it's not very good, but it caters to non-technical
people who have no idea it is, so, eh, what're you gonna do?

------
jMyles
This question needs to be asked about mediawiki.

------
icelancer
Wordpress processes $500k/year using WooCommerce + Stripe for my business. So,
uh, interesting definition of "terrible" considering it gets great
GTMetrix/YSlow/Google PageSpeed scores, scales well, I can hire developers to
extend it easily, and makes me a ton of money.

But OK. You don't like the source code. That matters more, I guess.

------
gesman
...because you'll be waiting around the corner to criticize it...

------
qznc
I recently found that MP3 upload fails if you have Unicode MP3 tags. Would
have thought that a bug like this would have been fixed by now.

------
paulhauggis
How is Wordpress 'terrible'?

I can launch a full-functional website and manage all of the users and even
have a shopping cart with checkout for under $200. Pretty much everything I
ever want to add onto to it (SEO, optimization, etc) has already been written
in the form of a plugin and is usually free.

I will admit, the internal code leaves a lot to be desired, but in terms of
the ecosystem, I haven't found anything better.

