I recently built a website for a client using Discourse. You can tell because it’s got a “Powered by Discourse” link. I did this even though 50% of the people I asked told me “Forums are probably overkill” for this sort of site. I think the result is clearly better than the previous page. But it did take kinda a long time to strip away the forum paint and slap on some business webpage styling. It won’t take much convincing to make me admit there at better tools for the job.
Did you know that 43.5% of all websites use WordPress? That must mean it’s the best tool for the job, right? Consider that it’s written in PHP, a language that is widely mocked, and stores data in MySQL, an objectively inferior database. If you screw up editing a WordPress configuration, you might need to FTP to the server and rename a file. Originally it was designed as a blogging platform and has been pressed into service as a content management system (CMS). It’s a system people tolerate rather than love.
WordPress perfectly demonstrates the Worse is Better principle. Richard P. Gabriel invented the idea to explain why people thought C and Unix are better than Lisp. What he came up with was the idea that it’s better to be simple and mostly correct than to be completely correct. It’s a variation of Voltaire’s “the best is the enemy of the good” line. As long as software reaches the low bar of “good enough” it has a chance get better as people start using it.
WordPress works well enough most of the time, so people used it for blogging. And since a blogging platform solves most of the hard problems of content management, it’s used as a CMS too. Of course you can use a CMS to serve static sites if you rarely change the content, so that was another way to use it. Plugins open up other features such as selling things and subscriptions. It’s not an ideal system for any of these uses, but it works for all of them.
Now there are so many people and organizations invested in WordPress, it’ll be part of the internet indefinitely. It’s developers accomplished the feat by delivering a good enough product and relentlessly improving it. In another post, I called this the “level 3 strategy” that involves looking ahead without assuming you already know the answers.