“You should never build a CMS”

This is a great testament to why 75% of the web runs on WordPress. Most of the problem mentioned have been solved by wordpress for ages, but there’s an entire industry set on reinventing the wheel in ways that really baffle me. If your actual goal is to publish on the web in a sane and understandable way, wordpress solves the problem for the largest number of cases. Scalability is solved. Usability by non tech editors is solved. Draft and approval flow is solved. Caching and speed is solved. You want headless? Oh, turns out wordpress is actually GREAT for that too.

It’s not sexy I guess? But if the goal is “work done” instead of “tech wank to impress investors with complexity”, that’s a solution that works very well.

It also heavily depends on _what type of content_ your CMS is serving. Blog posts and static pages? Okay, sure, probably fine to bolt WP on top and be done with it.

But as a CMS to build out landing pages for an ecommerce site with 10s of thousands of SKUs? That's where things fall down. I'm not going to reimport my entire catalog into WooCommerce or something just to show a block of 8 products. Do the products also need to be localized for pricing and language? Plugins/custom glue code. PDP pages? Custom content per product based on various supplier disclosure requirements? Meh, at that point, I need to build so much custom stuff on top of WP that I'd actually be better off owning the entire stack and finding a way to use their block editor as a library within my own system.

I've worked heavily in my career with both WordPress and more custom PHP applications and while they each have their tradeoffs, I would never suggest someone to use WordPress at this stage unless they are just getting started and their data models fits without a ton of customization. However, if you're really just starting out, you'd be likely better off with Squarespace or Shopify until your business outgrows those platforms and you need custom software to take your business to the next level. For some businesses, WordPress might be the right answer as a CMS, but for others, they might be better served by other solutions.

The only people I can confidently recommend WP for at this point are actual bloggers who will just use the WordPress.com free tier, or a news organization looking for a high quality interface to publish long form content. For new businesses, you'll be better served by other platforms until you outgrow them and your business needs become complicated enough to warrant custom software.

WordPress didn't solve anything. They just got the first.

They got there first, then as a result, they have:

- a big ecosystem of themes and plugins (especially for SEO)

- an army of contractors who can set it up for cheap, and don't know anything else

- users who know their way through the UI and don't even think about looking at alternatives

Nah, the likes of Drupal and others were established before Wordpress was launched, even longer if you consider Wordpress 1 & 2 were “blog software for blogs” more than the behemoth modern versions have become.

I think being later actually worked in their favor as they caught the wave that Drupal and others were too early for. They were simpler when a lot of new developers and clients were around and grew in complexity as what people did on the web did, while Drupal and co just seemed bloated, even though arguably modern versions of Wordpress with the plugin setups that are common now are even more complicated than those old version of their competitors at the start

Wordpress is nice, but not on the same league as Sitecore, AEM, Optimizely, Dynamics, and many other enterprise class CMS.

I guess those belong to the remaining 25%.

Agree 100%. But while your case is valid, I have the impression hacker news often forgets that the average IT/web professional is often dealing with mid-size companies whose needs are not those of the front of the line startup that need to woo investors with technical complexity. Re your case, I develop wordpress solutions since 2010 and I would never touch anything like that with anything but ecommerce specific solutions. Never once suggested woocommerce to anyone, by the way, since I believe for example that for all the small-to-medium shop needs there are plenty of low code embeddable solutions that work better. And the minute you need a little more, then Shopify is quite a good option.