WordPress no more
I started playing with WordPress back in its early days, back in 2004, to see if it was suitable for maintaing a website. At that time it wasn't, so I wrote my own CMS. It was a little ambitious as I didn't know that much PHP at the time.
Move forward a few years and I was asked to code an ecommerce plugin for WordPress to help a friend with their business. I had recently taken the plunge and installed WordPress on my site, but this plugin was the reason I looked again at WordPress as a serious contender for maintaing a website for others. This lead to my, now defunct, eShop plugin. For a few years it was in the top 3 ecommerce plugins, but became difficult to maintain and was retired some years ago.
I found myself spending a lot of time on the WordPress forums not just supporting my plugin, but WordPress itself. I was approached and invited to be a moderator on the forums, but shortly after I was asked to join a gaming company to support their games. My time was limited and the plugin was too difficult to maintain with WordPress updates as my free time was limited. This meant that I was no longer able to devote the time I used to helping out on the WordPress forums.
After some years I realised I was using WordPress less and less. Then I ran into issues with WordPress and their staff - and I'm including those that helped for free. This soured my relationship with WordPress, and then certain core changes were implemented, and unpaid moderators were purged from the forums. I went to use WordPress one day and couldn't even post a standard blog entry due to those changes. I did come across a fix, but it was too late for me, I wanted out. After searching and testing I found a plugin that would could extract posts and pages and turn them into basic HTML pages. It's far from perfect, but will at least keep them available.
Then I did some searching, I am not alone in thinking that WordPress has become massive and is no longer the lean and fast Blog/CMS that it used to be. There is a lot of bloat in the code, pages take longer to load because of the sheer weight of the code itself - and that is before you add in the actual content!
So I for one say that the age of WordPress has now passed, and a new contender is needed. A more lean CMS is needed, but built afresh so that lessons learnt elsewhere don't get repeated.
elfin