I think you see a lot of negative reactions about WordPress on places like HN because hits a bitter-spot (anti sweet spot) for most web application engineers:
* You don't start interacting with it via code or text files -- you administrate it through a series of web forms.
* Customization is done through plug-ins rather than composing familiar framework abstractions
* If when you do decide to look under the hood, it's not organized like any familiar back end from the last 10 years and will take you longer than usual to figure out
* Oh, yeah, PHP
It's pretty hard to argue with its success for people who aren't webapp engineers, though. And even from the engineering standpoint, after I had spent 2-3 years working on projects that used it as a basis for a platform, I came to a grudging (if tepid) respect for it.
Comments
I think you see a lot of negative reactions about WordPress on places like HN because hits a bitter-spot (anti sweet spot) for most web application engineers:
* You don't start interacting with it via code or text files -- you administrate it through a series of web forms. * Customization is done through plug-ins rather than composing familiar framework abstractions * If when you do decide to look under the hood, it's not organized like any familiar back end from the last 10 years and will take you longer than usual to figure out * Oh, yeah, PHP
It's pretty hard to argue with its success for people who aren't webapp engineers, though. And even from the engineering standpoint, after I had spent 2-3 years working on projects that used it as a basis for a platform, I came to a grudging (if tepid) respect for it.