Comment by EGreg
3 hours ago
There was a time I looked up to Matt Mullenweg, but never to Wordpress.
I've been building https://github.com/Qbix since 2008 and let me tell ya, I took a lot of great ideas from Drupal, Kohana, Symfony, etc. But never Wordpress. It's just ... a mess. Wordpress just won by being first, basically. Kind of like Bitcoin.
PS: Years ago, I hired a guy in Pakistan to work with me on some Wordpress sites, for clients. I thought that the Divi theme and basic Wordpress would be secure. Every one of those sites got pwned, badly. Sure, maybe it was the plugins. But why take the chance? In 2026 it's way past time to not have to worry about basic security.
Wordpress wasn't even first, Movable Type was the big thing before it.
WordPress began as a FOSS replacement of Movable Type after Moving Type 3 made the controversial decision to change its licensing fee for some features. So it was like a Unix/Linux situation.
That was Perl though, wasn't it? mod_perl more specifically, IIRC. That alone relegated to a small pool of users.