Study cases fascinate me (those well documented), and can be a great source on learning to succeed creating great products/services, but can also be confusing on why something made it big despite negative characteristics or lack of functions, "
bad products", yet still interesting: market acceptance can be challenging. I don't know, perhaps being unclear on what the product is and what it does can be elastic and positive to presume it can do lots of things (that probably can't do, or almost-can-do), at the end of the day: if people believe it can... they will use it.
It sucks, that's the word used out there. A search for Joomla, Drupal, Typo3, Magento, OpenCart, even Laravel, Cake, Symphony, Yii + "Sucks" brings from thousands to a few million results, nothing compared to x15 times the results on Wordpress sucks (hey, even 500,000 vs 5 million is a huge difference). This can't be used as a solid bulletproof argument about Wordpress being bad or worse compared to other players, I know, but we can also compare the amount of active and also abandoned threads on (dev and CMS) forums where even the things promised to work... don't work, and many offered solutions partially worked or didn't work. Joomla? Magento? LARAVEL? and Wordpress? apples and oranges, not quite. Wordpress use is so widespread it's been applied to all sorts of cases, even where it shouldn't be used, but hey elasticity is part of the premise or at least something we should keep in mind when we talk about how much people use Wordpress for anything, perhaps that's part of the problem, as many general use tools and frameworks suck because they aren't great at anything in specific (keep in mind the words of Lasmus Lerdof (creator of PHP, directly asked on his opinion on PHP frameworks).
About "
it sucks": let's remember VERY FEW will post an article on why the tool they are using works and makes life easier, but many will take the time to write about something that ruined hours of work or made everything fail. Digital "hate" is a big motivator, it has server as energy even to code new apps.
Unstoppable even if it fails. Where I live, a huge company with lots of budget started using Wordpress 10+ years ago despite advice against. The department promoting this was trying to open the doors to external devs that were not well trained, and the head of the department lacked the knowledge to understand the mistake. It's not new: if it's too difficult, lower the standards instead of hiring more well prepared people. The result among many issues is: sites were crashing on weekly basis. There were issues everywhere, from design, security and even performance. Then the "
experts" said a more powerful server was needed. This was an infinite list of something-fails->add-something-new-that-will-fix-it, same attitude would have got me fired but it worked for them.
Performance issues. At that time I was managing (for the company) 5 websites around 7K daily unique visits per day, the smallest one had around 1,500 daily visits. ALL in the same server, while two Wordpress sites were enough to make same-server-features crash. New servers were configured, then hired, then specialized servers to support Wordpress. Never in my life I witnessed something failing and getting extra help and funds to-make-it-work (except in the government). Even the main site of the company (managed by a team of highly trained monkeys) was able to handle all the load (gazillion views per month) with no sweat, but it was a custom made tool (just like the sites under my care).
A real life comparison with Drupal?, at least in this case. I was preparing to leave the company so I proposed to move the sites under my care to Drupal. Yes I had a more positive view of Drupal over Wordpress but that wasn't the reason, I really researched to present the options to the staff and leave the decision to them, they would need an intermediate solution (not custom made), so they could hire someone else later, after all there was no manual for the CMS I coded, or the CMS used on the main site (coded by a team). After the discussion I got the green light and all 5 sites with still the same traffic were fully migrated to Drupal (I coded the migration, there was no tool for that). And... it worked, same server, same 5 sites on the same server, no load issues. Wordpress sites a the hands of other departments were still crashing. Years later they moved everything to Wordpress, they wanted an "
all Wordpress team". Yes they killed several sites with decent traffic ending up around 200-500 visits per day, and the guys hired couldn't migrate the data.
Only one website remains till this day (2020) and the main page weights 10.1MB, fails quite often, it's ugly and slow, scores 6 on Google Insights for mobile and 36 for desktop, that's out of 100 points each. It's different people. Sysadmins, techs and experts in security came from banking companies and worked there, all of them were gone. Then we had lots of people stepping in who said they could code, but they couldn't, all they could do was Wordpress. This was a dark chapter in the company as many websites started failing and people got used to. Many meetings involved advice
against this or that, and all of that was ignored, there was a lot of human-administrative-issues involved, Wordpress was gaining space there despite the problems.
Again, I wouldn't consider that alone a bulletproof argument against Wordpress, many things wen't wrong and things failing are also common among other CMS and Frameworks. The thing is:there is no personal case against Wordpress, instead: just questions and interest on the topic, because there are lessons to be learned that also apply to other products and services, even perhaps operative systems, some other apps that failed managed to get great success in sales, it was a matter of people believing in them (even if they didn't work well), and so there was no need for a salesman, people would do the buying (and even selling) of the idea for free..
