Why “you should stop using WordPress” posts are ridiculous

WP Tips

Imagine this…

Let's say you're a man. A guy with slightly bushy hair. You walk into a Supercuts and ask for a haircut.

They ask you how you want it, and you tell them you want clippers (level 1) on the sides, and finger length, cut with scissors on the top.

With me so far?

Now imagine that the stylist, barber, hair cutter looks at you and says “I don't really like using clippers.”

Would you care? Would you stay? Would you just look at them with your mouth wide open?

That's how silly it feels when a development firm tells you that they want your project but don't want to code it in WordPress, even if you asked them to, because they don't like it. Because they want to use Laravel instead.

Wait… What about this?

Imagine it's 1996. And there are c++ programmers all around you. They love doing their own garbage collection and they're all about the pointers. Hard-core I tell you.

But your department chair in your company asks you to build out a little predictive model in Excel. Or maybe using this thing you know, called Visual Basic.

By all accounts, VB was never meant to build the kinds of complex solutions in the same way as c++. But because there were no pointers and garbage collection (something you really don't need to worry about understanding) was handled automatically, VB was easy to use.

Would you be surprised if I told you that companies across the globe were filled with teams and teams of people building “non-hardcore apps in VB?”

It's the truth. At one point there was no single technology more used across the globe. But by people that the c++ developers didn't consider “real developers.”

I'll be honest with you. WordPress doesn't implement the MVC pattern.

Whew. I said it.

Do you care? Should anyone care?

Telling someone they should stop using WordPress because it isn't an MVC implementation is insane. Ridiculous.

People choose WordPress but not because of MVC

WordPress isn't ignoring technology. But because WordPress isn't ignoring people.

Real people.

People who want websites. Websites that they can control. Websites that don't need to be rewritten in each new framework or technology every two years.

So let's set the record straight

WordPress isn't right for every single project. But it is very capable for many different kinds of applications beyond just a blog.

WordPress is plenty secure. And with managed hosts like Pagely, WP Engine and SiteGround, and auto-updating, the codebase can be repaired quickly and easily.

WordPress has a new REST API arriving soon. This API will change a lot. I mean a lot. You'll be able to do things you've never thought of.

Tons of development shops can make it do just about anything.  While it's true that some company announced today that they moved on from WordPress, I'm happy to tell you that companies like where I work (and many others) know how to do really crazy or serious things with WordPress.

Need to talk to some of them?

These are folks that know what's possible with WordPress and won't tell you to stop using WordPress simply because it's written in PHP, not MVC, or has a data model that they don't like.

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