The hallmark of Wordpress is ease of use. That's why you can spin up a blog right on their site, and they have a backend designed by Happy Cog. Wordpress is blog software for the technically illiterate.
And then I take a look at this blog post that lists all the incantations necessary to scale Wordpress to reasonable scale and I wonder why anyone should do this.
If you're setting up your own server, installing nginx, configuring PHP, and doing automated load testing, maybe you should also consider rolling your own software or using a different package that isn't supremely bloated.
The thing is this - configuring a server is one set of problems, building a decent CMS database/backend is another set of problems, and building a decent browser-based UX for content authoring is a third set.
Very few people have all three of these skills, and it's fair to say that 2 and 3 are not yet solved problems. Rolling your own CMS for any non-trivial purpose is always something that sounds like a good idea until you try it, and then you start hitting all of the incredible idiosyncrasies and speed bumps that other CMS have already solved, even if they've done it poorly.
I'm not exactly defending Wordpress and its lousy code, but in my experience with publishing CMSs, if it's powerful enough to flex to non-trivial needs (Modern WP, Drupal, Django, CQ, etc), then it's probably going to feel like a bloated/complex mess to a programmer, because of all the nuances in the problem space.
Having worked on both sides of this one, i'd rather solve the 'scale this crappy software' problem than the 'Build a useable UX solution that does everything we need and works on mobile and in IE8' problem.
> if it's powerful enough to flex to non-trivial needs (Modern WP, Drupal, Django, CQ, etc), then it's probably going to feel like a bloated/complex mess to a programmer, because of all the nuances in the problem space.
This is a good rule of thumb, but I have found one shining exception, and it is called ProcessWire. If you've never tried it, I highly recommend a look. It's a CMS that essentially offers you a blank slate and a set of simple, powerful tools that let you mold it into something else quite quickly.
I think CMS engines like wordpress are great for semi technical people who are curious enough to set stuff up themselves.
However whenever I've had a website to develop I've never seen the point of using one.
If the website is going to be very simple the chances are it doesn't really need a full on CMS.
All it needs is an HTML/CSS layout and some content that can come from either static HTML files, a few form handlers and perhaps some parts that my client can update themselves. Most of the time this can be solved by simply creating a part of the site behind a login with a few text boxes that update a database and are then displayed on the site or the ability to create lists of things.
I can create this sort of functionality myself from scratch in an afternoon or so and it is usually much easier to use for the client because it will have less buttons on the interface and be designed around metaphors that they are actually interested in (for example types of cake or whatever).
I gave a client Drupal to use once and the result was that they would just call me up every time they wanted an update done to the site.
If it's something non trivial then I'd rather not have to work around a clunky PHP codebase and worry about the plethora of security updates I would have to do when I could just create something much more flexible in Java/Scala/Python.
Your forgetting that this favors your more than them.
People dont want to learn a new system, and they are confortable with wordpress.
There are millions of devs and designers also familiar with wordpress - which can mean they can leave you in an instant and get anyone else to make changes or add feature to the site easily.
That's assuming they are already familiar with wordpress, most people have never used a CMS in their life.
If requirements are simple then all you generally need is an admin area with about 3-4 links.
Something like:
Change Homepage Text
Show Customer Inquiries
Add Item to catalog
This is much easier to understand to a newbie than "Add Page" , "Add menu item" etc.
If they want complicated changes they will usually end up calling me anyway.
I always keep the coding for my simple sites simple enough that any competent developer should be able to figure it all out in an hour or so anyway.
Many people who are not technically inclined do not have time to do much modification to their website themselves, so will generally not bother if you give them something with a lot of power like a full CMS.
Most small business people aren't going to go around installing new designs on their site on a whim (isn't that what they paid the designer to design?).
They want something they can log into once every couple of weeks and post some minor update too, then possibly consider a redesign 2 years down the line at which point they are likely to want to throw out most of what they have anyway which doesn't matter since they spent maybe $1000 on the whole thing.
If the site provides any kind of complex functionality then wordpress is really no longer going to make sense as a core to build around. Here 90% of the site is likely to be customer forms, order processes etc that don't fit into any convenient pre-existing model. At this point if you build around an off the shelf CMS 90% of the site will be custom plugin code so there will not be a huge benefit to anyone who would take over the code.
It's all about making the business itself a first class citizen rather than a particular piece of software.
I would argue that the latter 2 things are not truly needed, and can be iterated on over time. You don't need a CMS, you already have one built into your server: the file system. You don't need a browser-based UX, it's a nice to have. If surviving Reddit's front page is your goal, it's pretty easily doable.
_You_ might not need a CMS, but I guarantee that the vast majority of content sites that pull in 10MM visitors+/day have a cms.
You make a good point that if you're just a simple blogger firing off posts in a defined layout, you may as well just hand code html and send static files. I took the point of his post to be more for people who know they have to offer a CMS, and want some basic scaling settings.
+1 - Nothing like being able to show a client who's got a billion dollar idea that his site can handle 10M users for $15/mo.
Just remember to explain all the caveats that are being discussed here. We're nothing without out integrity. Your client won't be listening to that point though, he'll only be excited he's going to be a billionaire for $15/mo.
Well if they are going to be getting that amount of traffic either they have a very poor conversion rate/profit margin or they could just afford a proper dedicated server or two.
The Happy Cog design was short lived. We redesigned in house for version 2.7 in 2008.
> "blog software for the technically illiterate"
According to what metric? Not having the ability (and the huge amount of time) to roll their own blog software, or learn how to use Git and Jekyll? Try and look at the world from a broader perspective. Not everyone is a programmer, but they still have interesting things to say to the world.
> all the incantations necessary to scale Wordpress to reasonable scale
10 million page views a day is reasonable scale? C'mon. No combination of Digg and Reddit and Daring Fireball or anything else will get you even close to this. There is a selection of caching plugins for WordPress that'll get any site on shared hosting to easily sustain those types of real world traffic bursts. For people who do need a million plus page views a day, they're in "good problem to have" territory, and probably have long since acquired technical assistance, or have switched to a WordPress-specific host like WordPress.com, WP Engine, Page.ly, or ZippyKid which has high volume caching already configured for you.
Are your engineers going to be writing the content? We run a WordPress instance just as a CMS that then gets pulled into memcache to be served up within our site. It's clunky, but there's no reason to reinvent an editing interface.
> If you're setting up your own server, installing nginx, configuring PHP, and doing automated load testing, maybe you should also consider rolling your own software
This is actually very easy to do. I just did it. Maybe 1000 lines of code for everything, with proper caching and templating thrown in. The most difficult parts of a blog are the comments and search. If you use something like Disqus for comments and Google Custom Search for search, things become very easy to manage.
Regarding ease of use, if you are a dev, there's always toto or jekyll. Throw in disqus for commenting and you are pretty much done. Each blog is just a simple haml/erb/liquid template and git push is all you need to get a new page/blog up.
And then I take a look at this blog post that lists all the incantations necessary to scale Wordpress to reasonable scale and I wonder why anyone should do this.
If you're setting up your own server, installing nginx, configuring PHP, and doing automated load testing, maybe you should also consider rolling your own software or using a different package that isn't supremely bloated.