Ask HN: What's Wrong with WordPress?
5 points by pabloh03 3 hours ago | 7 comments
Not a question about the organization or founder. I'm curious as a product what would you change about WordPress / what would you do differently if you could rebuild it from scratch today?
  • PaulHoule 3 hours ago |
    What I remember from the time I used Wordpress (about 10 years ago) was that everybody was trying to spam links on your site, that could include spam comments but would also involve people taking advantage of any security loophole they could find. If you kept patched you might be alright but if you walk away for a few months you might find spam links in places you didn’t even know your site had.
  • wmf 2 hours ago |
    I remember people always talking about installing caching plugins which made me wonder why caching isn't built in.
  • noashavit 2 hours ago |
    It's older, slower, and clunkier than more modern alternatives. It's a monolith in the age of microservices
  • matt_s 2 hours ago |
    Are people genuinely building new things with Wordpress these days?

    Years ago there was a surge of people putting out blogs and websites like that which brought demand for plug-ins, etc. Long form text content isn't the trend now, its podcasts and vlogs, etc. In some ways, amateur content creators just need a smartphone.

    I think if someone was going to build a platform for nearly anyone to publish content it would need to have easy plugins to do things with video and audio and not be focused just on text. Allowing people to build plug-ins and themes and install them is a key feature.

    I think the technology choice that would make this easiest these days is JavaScript (even tho I'm not a user). The numbers of people out there today with deep JS skills are similar to when there were a lot of PHP developers building WordPress plugins. It allows for front and back end development which could be an advantage to a plugin based tool like WordPress is.

    • whyoh 2 hours ago |
      >Are people genuinely building new things with Wordpress these days?

      Yes, because it's still the best tool for certain tasks. A blog with well integrated commenting, for example.

    • pabloh03 2 hours ago |
      Thanks this is helpful, and your response tells me a lot of why some people don't want to use it anymore. It's still massive though https://joost.blog/cms-market-share/
  • jdboyd an hour ago |
    Rebuilding it today and how I would build it then if I knew what I know now are two different questions. There is also the question of what went wrong. I don't like the block editor introduced in 2018.

    If I were building it today, I would write it in golang and I would offer the ability to export static sites. I would make comments an optional or external module since spam has largely ruined comments sections for anyone who doesn't get many legitimate comments. Why golang? Because it typically has the easiest deploy story, IMO.

    If I were writing it then, I would have written it in Python and chosen PostgreSQL as the database. Of course, back then that is what I would have chosen as well.