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WordPress Now Powers Over One-Third of the Top 10 Million Sites on the Web (wordpress.org)
WordPress now powers over 1/3rd of the top 10 million sites on the web, according to W3Techs. From a blog post: Our market share has been growing steadily over the last few years, going from 29.9% just one year ago to 33.4% now. We are, of course, quite proud of these numbers! The path here has been very exciting. In 2005, we were celebrating 50,000 downloads. Six years later, in January 2011, WordPress was powering 13.1% of websites. And now, early in 2019, we are powering 33.4% of sites. Our latest release has already been downloaded close to 14 million times, and it was only released on the 21st of February.
So what does that say.
One 5-second page load at a time.
God bless 'em
How anyone can run Wordpress and sleep at night is beyond my ability to comprehend. Must either be really brave or really really really stupid.
I do WordPress development and Consulting for a living. Quite a good living. This piece of software is utterly amazing. Built by people who obviously didn't have the faintest idea about how to build a proper web application it's become the perpetual source of things to fix and work to do.
Absolutely amazing.
Just this week a huge installation running WP and WooCommerce, bloated by idiots who added 40+ plugins to this mission critical (!!) setup finally exploded into the face of my employer who wouldn't listen for over a year I've been warning him.
You can do amazing stuff with WordPress, but only if you know how to work around it's pitfalls and do most of the things not using WordPress utilities or the abysmally broken WP DB model. I will continue to do so because there's simply no end to jobs right now but you need good humor to deal with the daily crazy.
Truly amazing.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You can do amazing stuff with ______________ (insert anything) but only if you know how to work around it's pitfalls and do most of the things not using _____ utilities or the abysmally broken _____ model.
In the words of e.e. cummings:
"there is some shit i will not eat"
I am legitimately shocked.
A turd responsible for over 1/3rd if the top sites... brilliant.
I wanted to make a blog at some point and was told that Wordpress is the most popular thing out there by far, so it would be easy to support, 1-click installed by my host etc. I didn't give it another thought, I mean, how bad could it be?
So it took me a while to realize just how bad and how slow it is exactly. It was clearly developed by people who had no idea about... well anything, really. Mindboggling how it caught on so much.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I like WordPress, but the repository of plug-ins suck- or at least the way most developers work the system. Everybody offers "premium" plug-ins and it's disgusting. I'm not against contributing to development or otherwise financing it, I've funded more free software development than probably any Slashdot user ever, but to restrict use of "premium" code like this is disgusting. I'm not a huge fan of Drupal either, but I can't say I've had a problem with this "premium" non-sense. Drupal is just a PITA, but when you need it you need it. And yea- I do write code for a living too so this isn't "you want everything for free nonsense" and I do make my living off of developing free consumer software which is suppose to be the "hardest" to make money from (I am relatively wealthy at that).
Banshee was built to be secure. And because complexity is the enemy, it's small and easy. That led to a very fast framework. But despite of being small, it has many features, like weblog, a forum, newsletter, photo album and basic webshop functionality and libraries for databases, e-mail, HTTP, logfiles, etc. Worth giving it a shot.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
Grav, Barebones, jekyll to name a few.
And then there is the up-and-coming CaaS (CMS as a Service).
WordPress will be obsolete in a few years. All that needs to happen is have a few hosting providers realize there are better, more performant options and kick all the users running WP sites off their networks.
https://www.cvedetails.com/pro...
The leadership of Drupal - Wordpress's only real competition a decade ago - decided to grow up and cater to real programmers and the corporate/enterprise clients of Acquia (the Drupal creator's company). His decision to go all-in with OOP left average Drupal users - web "coders" that are not classically trained and didn't need or want the higher level of difficulty (and development costs) just to get the same results in their use case - hanging in the wind.
That has left upwards of a million legacy Drupal 6 and 7 sites that don't have the resources to go to a heavier OOP platform like Drupal 8 hanging in the wind. I suspect that the overwhelming majority of them will become Wordpress sites simply because it will be "good enough".
In the meantime, Wordpress continues to have more features bolted onto it by a growing community that has less technical expertise per capita than other CMSes. Being a Wordpress "expert" means you can 1) use SFTP and set up a webhosting account, 2) read some intelligently written documentation (unlike Drupal for most of its existence), and 3) hack together some PHP via Google search + stackexchange snippets (that you don't really understand enough to work - regardless of security or supportability). It also means you're a dime a dozen - and won't get paid very much unless you're really good at it (or you manage other WP devs).
The sad part for the slowly rotting community of mostly non-OOP Drupal experts/coders/architects is that Backdrop CMS - a fork of Drupal 7 from around 5-6 years ago - was the right path forward for them. The fork's creators have simplified Drupal back to where it was when it was gaining in popularity (Drupal 5-6 era) and was simpler to work with, all while continuing to add new features and keep its core strengths that made it a better CMS tool to use than Wordpress for all but the simplest of blog sites.
Backdrop CMS was supposed to take Drupal's old place in the small-to-medium website market, while the current OOP-based Drupal v8+ moved onto enterprise-level clients. That hasn't happened, however, because it gets zero marketing from the remaining stalwards in the Drupal community that have become too invested in the Drupal brand to see the writing on the wall:
(1) OOP-based Drupal (v8+) will never be accepted as a real option for small-to-medium websites when WordPress is cheaper and faster in most cases.
(2) Despite its change to OOP, Drupal 8+ talent is still too hard to find to warrant an enterprise-level investment - espeically when other more well-known framework options (with big money behind them) are out there.
(3) Unless you work for Acquia or have some other enterprise-level client(s) with already deep Drupal roots, the Drupal job market is winding down fast - and when everyone's transitioned out of Drupal 5-7, it's over. Adapt or die.
Backdrop will hopefully not serve as another reminder that the winners in free markets are usually the products with the best marketing and lowest total cost of ownership (the "good enough" choice) - not the one with the best reliability, build quality, or number of features.
Wordpress is a mess, but there are a few plugins that can drastically reduce the attack surface and the likelihood of an attacker making any headway.
I'd recommend Wordfence and Block Bad Queries, to name just a couple. I wouldn't run a WP site without at least these two plugins, period. There are also some decent guides to hardening a WP site and they're well worth the time to look at.
And to address the inevitable screaming that will occur regarding WP and its mess of spaghetti code, I agree 100% that you shouldn't have to add these plugins just to keep a WP installation safe, but it is what it is.
And FWIW, I have no connection to either of these plugins or to Wordpress itself. I don't generally like using WP but sometimes when all you need is a quick site without any fancy crap, it's okay.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...