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Comment by berkes

20 days ago

WordPress is the exact example of the opposite of your point. WP started as the edge of a wedge. But contrary to the examples in TLA, it didn't become an everything platform deliberate and predetermined, but organical and messy.

It started as a "blogging tool" and only that - it still is to some extent in 2024: it still has traces of "blogs" in its DBA, code, templating and so on.

It was successfull exactly because of that focus. As opposed to Joomla! and Drupal and many others that never even made it. WordPress gained a "plugin system" but later than most others and far more limited. In the beginning plugins were really to customize your blog - but it was still very much a blog.

When blogging wasn't that popular anymore - relatively, it pivoted into more of a brochureware CMS by leveraging the plugin system, but core was very much still a blog. I can't recall how many requests I had from customers to "remove this confusing blog-thing, we don't use that don't we". It could not be removed.

Then, after a while, it became the everything CMS. Slowly and rediculously clumsy. It still is. It's far worse at "being a webshop" than almost all dedicated webshop software one can choose instead. It's rediculously inadequate for anything close to "social media" - or user-generated content (due to its depenance on- and design of- the caching, mostly).

So, WP may be some "everything platform" by popularity and common use. But it's both bad at this and never predetermined to be that.

3 comments

berkes

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fragmede  20 days ago

What would you choose instead, in this day and age?

  • berkes  20 days ago

    For what?

    That's the crucial question. Because the important parameter to "what is best ?" isn't the "day and age", but the exact use-case, and to lesser extent, requirements, existing stacks, team capabilities etc etc.

    If you have a company with 58 wordpress instances, then I'm pretty sure the best option for almost any use-case for the 59th instance is "wordpress".

    But if you are an artist that makes and sells bracelets from local sea-shells, with little interest in learning technical stuff, you are almost certainly better of with an etsy and/or shopify. If only for the TCO.

    And the bakery around the corner who just needs their opening hours and some nice impression in the form of a video, story and some images (brochureware) online, wix, squarespace or one of its many (open source) competitors. Or, if you just need a quick three-page landingpage for your tech startup, in a team of mostly software engineers, a hugo or jekyll site is quite probably by far preferable.

    There are so many alternatives that "do one thing and do it well (or better than the generalists without focus)". It's really about having the ability to filter through these instead.