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This for "a spiritual successor to WordPress".

Maybe not applicable in this case, but Github has a ridiculously low threshold for when it starts hiding diffs. Probably a limitation of their new React frontend.

could just be a coincidence

It should. I miss the days when tech was interesting and fun.

Even Steve Jobs, for all his later-day revisionist hard-assed reputation, enjoyed the occasional Easter egg, inside joke, or April Fool's joke.

But you're right, I was an extremely angry person back then. Many years of therapy and deliberate ongoing work and I'm a radically different man. Thank goodness I got to the other side.

No. Not even a little. HN is not food. HN is not water. HN is not my family or my job or in any way vital to my life. It's an amusement. A diversion.

I am not a FOMO victim.

It was a nice tradition but, like many things, the scene got too big and corporate. It was a zombie tradition for a while then slowly faded away.

In fact when cloudflare started releasing serious things on 4/1, I found it to be a refreshing subversion of the trope.

"Better coded" is very much a subjective assessment.

I really appreciate your work and even more that you took time and risk exposing your findings, I wish more people did this.

That site warns that WordPress plugins can be abandoned, but that's clearly not a WordPress specific issue. Sure some site could use SSG, but that's a different design.

I certainly don't want to claim WordPress security is good, but I'm not sure that site is measuring anything meaningful.

yes you want a global db handle sure ya lets delete all tables woohoo

You've sort of nailed it, but this isn't a bad thing. An alternative for these customers does not exist.

There's another vertical which is organizations that have armies of writers churning out content. Any kind of publisher or advertiser, basically. There is no better CMS for this. Large organizations like NYT, etc chose to write their own.

> You've sort of nailed it, but this isn't a bad thing. An alternative for these customers does not exist.

Yes! I'm locked into WordPress, which I hate, because it's the only platform that will allow a non-developer to maintain it if I get hit by a bus.

A decade ago I had to learn and run WordPress for a job. I held my nose up the stink was so bad. But quickly I learned how to manage it and have modern sensible practices around it and I've probably gotten more real value out of it than any other CMS or web framework I've touched. That includes Rails.

Thankfully I don't have to do that anymore, but you can sanely and safely run WordPress today and there's zero shame in it.

Wordpress is solidly in that middle ground where you can do a large amount of customization if someone'll pay for it, and then they can do the day-to-day care and feeding of it.

Everything else has either been much worse in all possible ways (Joomla!) or has been a collection of developer wish-lists unusable by anyone (Drupal).

Ivory tower "just don't use a low-cost solution" people aren't going to hand over money to people to use a higher-cost one, are they?

And ignoring why it's used besides the sloppiness means they have a huge blind spot to what people actually want:

"wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious"

Nothing in this quote doesn't describe very real needs.

The real test for any WordPress replacement: can a non-technical business owner hire someone on Fiverr to customize it in an afternoon? WordPress passes that test. Nothing else does. That's not a technology problem, it's a labor market problem.

That has been my experience, low barrier to entry, low price, shoddy work. Or hire an agency, pay top dollar for little work.