I’ve been a WordPress user for as long as I’ve been in tech, maybe 20 plus years. I think I picked it up as early as 2004 or something, back when it was one of the blogging platform that you can self-host just like Blogger or Movable Type. Back then Drupal, Mambo (which later spawned Joomla) and a few forum software like phpBB, InvisionBoard and vBulletin with ‘portal’ addon were considered CMS.

The reason I picked and sticked with WP was simple, it was dead easy for non-developer like myself. In the olden days, if you want to apply a ‘mod’, you need to either open up the source file, find the exact line and modify the code in there as per the author’s instruction. WordPress revolutionized this process by introducing a plugin system that essentially just works™. You only need to find the plugin, download a zip file, extract it, then FTP to your server and upload the files to wp-content/plugins and it would automagically show up in the Plugins section in your admin panel. I know that sounds like a lot of work by today’s standard, especially with the WP plugin repository just streamlined everything so you can literally add a plugin by clicking a button or two, but back then it was like magic. WordPress’s simplicity is something that many webmasters these days take for granted, but once in a while you get a reality check when switching to another legacy system (looking at you nopCommerce, having to restart the literal effing app on each plugin removal/addition is unacceptable in 2024, hell it was barely acceptable in 2012 when the project was conceived).

But enough preamble, let’s go back to the current state of things. With its ease of use, WP has now gradually grown to power close to half the whole damn internet. But 2024 has been a pretty rough year of the WordPress ecosystem, mostly because Matt Mullenweg, the guy who was supposed to be its leader, made a series of inexplicable self-destructive actions in 2024 that pretty much ruined the whole platform’s reputation. The whole thing was confusing to be honest, it started off with Mullenweg declaring war with WP Engine, a competitor to his own WordPress.org, which was a normal as any other drama, but then it got weird. Instead of pooling his resource and battle WPE like a normal person, he proceeded to destroy himself, his company and basically his entire legacy that he built over the cause of 2 decades, even resorting to thievery. It’s inexplicable, if I was a conspiracy theorist I might even assume he was working for WP Engine to begin with.

And even putting the whole drama thing aside, WordPress as a platform itself is showing its age. I learned a bunch of new things this year, even made a few fun projects using more modern tech and noticed just how fast everything is these days compare to WordPress. Some people attribute this to PHP but I disagree, Laravel is a thing and I’ve seen Laravel projects with speed that rival anything else in existence. No it’s a problem with WordPress, it’s been going for far too long, become far too bloated for its own good.

I’ve explored building a new site with Astro, migrated every post I have here over there and generally I’m happy with the speed, but I’m still too lazy to migrate over decade worth of images to the new site, so right now it’s only a massive wall of text with no images. It shouldn’t be too hard to migrate the images to imagekit or cloudinary but because I always want to take any opportunity to learn new way to self-host things (aka. likes to overcomplicate things), I want to spin up minIO and host my own S3 to keep my stuffs. That of course will take extra time, and I’m not very well known for time handling.

Let’s hope I can get some stuffs done in 2025