What’s with all the folks online tearing down other people’s stack?
I’ve read many a post in the past few weeks where people have been complaining about WordPress. There are justifiable complaints, obviously. However I feel like some developers and designers have made their entire existence about hating WordPress. Celebrating people moving off the platform. There are folks who post 2,000 word articles about how they hate Wapuu’s, sharing it as critiques on the community at the whole. But if you read the article fully, they simply hate Wapuu.
I mean, look at him. People hate him1.
Like…mate…who hurt you?
Obviously, everybody is entitled to their opinion. But I find it a bit strange. Making your entire personality on hating anything is weird, but especially for hating something as benign as a tech stack. Mate, Node.js won’t sleep with you. I also think it’s strange that people openly post on company blogs this. At least I try and keep it a bit separate. It’s woefully unprofessional and I can’t imagine it gets many customers.
Of course WordPress has problems. The block editor is a bit clunky still, and I am cheering on Fair to succeed. But nothing else is perfect. Shopify has problems2, Next.js has problems3, Webflow has problems. Different tools have positives and negatives. Being wedded to one system is always limiting. Be curious of other things4, explore the bubble outside, recognise which tools are best for the job, and go with them.
Never one of the Cool Kids
For me, I find the tool the most comforting to be WordPress. It’s creaky and clunky at time, but the sites rank well enough and do okay, plus I can make changes easily. There’s a reason why it’s been popular for so long. Same way COBOL has been around for so long. WordPress doesn’t attract the cool kids, but do you want your bank account to be cool5? Or traffic light systems to be cool? I don’t know about you, but I’d rather they work. I think WordPress is in the same place.
I find it similar to a patriotism. Usually the ones who I deem to be the most patriotic I find the ones who don’t bang on about it and recognise there are problems along the way. Whereas the folks who make their whole personality around a flag or a leader just a bit weird. Like they have nothing else to offer bar a piece of fabric from a flagpole. Because their piece of fabric is in their mind is better than your piece of fabric. And they want you to know about it.
I think developers who make their whole personality of “Hating on WordPress” similar. It’s text in a file that you open on a computer. We don’t have to be so emotional about it.
Finally – I’d like to draw your attention to the heading of the post. Do you know how difficult to find a roundabout that hasn’t been defaced in the UK in the year of our Lord 2025? To use as a base for my top image? Surely that’s worth a share just for that.
- I may have assumed the gender of Wapuu. In which case, I apologise. ↩︎
- Shopify is a nightmare for redirects. Like really bad. I had to use my friend Shane’s approach to redirects with it. As redirects in Shopify is completely unusuable. ↩︎
- Have you ever tried to use Next.js to put anything in the header – like JSON+LD? And for it to work? Impossible. ↩︎
- For what it’s worth in my limited free time I’m exploring Astro, Eleventy and Laravel ↩︎
- Every single challenger bank in the UK I know have had problems – particularly when things go wrong. Whereas I’m very happy with my Lloyds account. ↩︎