[Darth-Apple]

I've used a few different CMSs (content management systems) over the years. Drupal used to be my go to. I really don't know what I was thinking. Drupal is one of the most difficult, least stable (unless you're a developer), and slowest CMSs in existence. It's also losing popularity. But for whatever reason, it worked really well for Simlink and I back when we used to make "filecave" file exchanges for game mods for websites. There wasn't really anything you couldn't do with it. It was pretty powerful once you got the hang of it, and at the time, it was often the only CMS you could use to get the job done if you needed something highly customized.

But I've been playing around with Wordpress now, and wordpress has about a 35% market share of all websites on the internet now. It's a lightweight little package made for blogs, but there is literally not much you can't do with it. It's rock solid. You can install themes, plugins, and updates with a single click. There are thousands of plugins that literally make almost anything possible. You can make social media sites, forums, galleries, corporate websites, or just about anything else. There are an increasing number of mega-corporations that are now using Wordpress over the alternatives.

Have you guys ever used wordpress? Do you think there will be any good alternatives to it in the long run, or is Wordpress sort of remaining the de-facto standard for easy content management systems?

I ask, because I've been messing with Drupal as well. Drupal has about 1/20 of the market share of Wordpress, and it used to be much more popular than it is now. Joomla is not really a realistic alternative, so it kinda seems like there's a ferarri racing against a ton of Altimas. There are alternative CMS', but they aren't really a match.

I also know that JS-frameworks such as Angular, and non-PHP solutions (nodeJS, Django/Flask, etc.) are gaining popularity as well. It will be interesting to see how PHP stacks up against the alternatives in 10 years.

[SpookyZalost]

@darth, I've had a WordPress blog before... Honestly I like my home grown solution better but I understand not everyone can edit html when they want to post an update. As far as alternatives, I think federated, decentralized options are eventually going to be the norm. You see with the way corps are cracking down on content and freedom of apeech, decentralized alternatives make it that much more difficult to take something down, while also providing the customizable interfaces we've come to love.

I also understand why WordPress is so popular, it's easy to deploy and modify how you want it, and there's tons of designers familiar with it so companies can go for the lowest bid.

[Lain]

It got popular because it's well, easy. You don't need to be a web developer to use it. All you need to do is click buttons and type some content in and it'll handle the rest.

I doubt there will be any more alternatives. PHP is still way faster than Node will ever be (love me some abstraction layers) and PHP doesn't run the web server like Node typically does, instead operating like a module for the web server which is already fast AF because it's been developed for decades and constantly improved on.
Not tryna excuse PHP for being a terribly designed language but hey, it's easy to work with because of all the docs and countless tutorials everywhere.

In a decade PHP might die, but again I wouldn't bet on it. We might see PHP8 as a huge overhaul of the whole thing, like Perl5 vs. Perl6 being nowhere near similar.

[Darth-Apple]

PHP has gotten far, far better over the years. It's actually, yea, I agree. You hit it on the head. It's been optimized forever and is pretty fast nowadays. (PHP 7.4 put a JIT compiler into the language. Even python doesn't have that.)

It's not really a horribly designed language once you get used to it, so much as it's just... different. I would far rather program in Python any day. PHP is easy and still powerful, but it is more or less just inconsisistent. (isset checks if a value is 0, but if you actually set it to 0, it's technically still set, but isset() returns false. Callbacks work differently between a class and a function, etc.)

I'd rather see inconsistent behavior than have breaking changes. People are still using Python 2 today because of those changes, and it's been a decade. Incidentally, PHP 8 will have some breaking changes, but properly coded websites shouldn't have an issue. It would be nice if they fixed some of these inconsistencies, but it's not really possible to do without breaking most of the websites on the internet today.

@Zalost: That's a good way to put it. Heck, you and I both are developers. We both still find it easier to use software that "just works"

I've long been thinking about doing a CMS for MyBB. I stop myself every time I see CMS' that are already built. It's a lot of work getting one made from the ground up, but once they exist, they make life a hell of a lot easier.

[Thomas]

I've used Wordpress many times and still use Wordpress. It got popular because it's easy to use and it's been around forever! I like it!

[Divya165]

WordPress is such a versatile, super-friendly content management system, that not only is it used by Fortune 500 companies like eBay, GM, and Reuters News, it is also used by over 7.5 million other sites of all sizes and niches.

1. PLUGIN STABILITY AND AUTONOMY
2. MULTISITE OPTION
3. PLUGIN POWER AND VERSATILITY
4. EASE OF USE
5. THEMES

[Guardian]

SUPER easy to use. I've even thought of putting Aeowulf on it, but finding a way to convert forum threads to blog posts was weird and my tests failed. I didn't work at it too hard, but that's a DB issue and I hate DBs. You can set up a site in minutes and just go... its great.

[Megan]

I've used it off and on over the years. Currently using it for my blog. Its definitely gotten even better over the years.

Only other thing I've ever used is Cutephp or whatever it was called. Oh and Fusion News.

[SpookyZalost]

Honestly I was still preferring running my own homebrew solution to things but recently I've started to see why wordpress is kinda awesome, it's literally the lego of website building.

easy to setup, easy to configure any way you want and easy to make do just about anything.

with a huge community behind it I can see why it's popular, especially with the huge number of plugins to do just about everything.

[Divya165]

Simple its a user friendly to use.