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I'm a freelance web developer and I normally work on small to medium sized websites, 9 out 10 times based on WordPress and 10 out 10 times with a limited budget.

8 out of 10 times the sites content will be updated by someone with at best casual knowledge in website management.

Say what you will about WP but it's my bread and butter and it works great for just these kinds of websites; where the cost is a dealbreaker and the end product should be as user friendly as a standard word processor.

No, you probably wouldn't build a control panel for the next space shuttle or an online bank in WordPress, but I rarely need to concern myself with those kinds of projects so that really doesn't affect me.

Pretty much the same reason I have a Kia car even though I wouldn't win a Formula 1 race with it.

I for one am grateful that there's an open source tool available to my clients that more than adequately meets their needs (that's also fun to work with and build custom solutions on for me as a developer).

Comments
  • 7
    The only problem I have with WordPress is more of a problem with its plugin ecosystem than with WordPress itself. Or maybe it's only a problem for me because I normally do infrastructure-level work and only touch the backend when things are really broken, so I only ever interact with a WordPress instance when someone has already fucked it up by installing a malicious or insecure plugin.

    So I guess I don't really have anything against WordPress. Just the people who try to use it with very little experience and end up doing things they shouldn't.
  • 5
    Only used it once to create a site for a friend’s business. Never used it before, didn’t know anything about it, and have zero php knowledge.
    Got to say I was very impressed how easy it was, I used the free version of Elementor and it was easy money.
  • 4
    @EmberQuill That is a common situation unfortunately!
  • 2
    @EmberQuill Yeah, and that a big part of why it's so bad to work with overall. The community contributes mostly bloat, and that is probably to a big part in turn due to the bloat in the PHP ecosystem.
  • 1
    I am absolute garbage at everything to do with frontend, so for my personal site with my writings and all I just used WordPress and loved it. For something like that which doesn't need plugins it's a great experience, and when working on my site I want to focus on writing, not on CSS or whatever. I guess it works great for what it was initially designed to do.

    I then built personal sites with similar requirements for my cousin and a bunch of other people (all non-tech folks) and they're happily managing it on their own and haven't called me up to fix anything even once in years. That's pretty cool.
  • 1
    @RememberMe yeah, when you don't try to massively extend WordPress I suppose it works pretty well. I never used it for my own personal stuff but all the big problems I've seen with it were ultimately caused by bad plugins.
  • 2
    You could say it's biggest strength (being accessible to anyone) is also it's biggest weakness. 😏
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