Twenty years ago, WordPress was released. A couple of months after that, the third edition of Core PHP Programming was published. I recognized the potential of PHP in 1997, and I found a switch to WordPress in 2003 to be “an interesting idea that would encourage me to write more content more often“. Today and for a long time, most of the Web has run on WordPress and PHP (and MySQL). I recall justifying PHP over Perl (or any number of other platforms that have come and gone). I recall justifying WordPress over other CMSs. Today, it’s hard to argue against either given the long track record of performance.
The primary argument I hear is that these tools aren’t fashionable. Well, it’s usually spoken like, “it doesn’t feel modern”. Yeah, WordPress is boring, as in, no one will think you’re crazy for picking it to build your marketing site. It is a completely reasonable choice for the typical site, and if you can’t find a plugin to cover some unusual feature you need, it’s easy to create one because the whole stack is open source.
