WooThemes joins Automattic
I'm fascinated by Wordpress success.<p>It's an horrible peace of software, with horrible PHP code 4.x style, a db schema only a beginner could have come up with and an ecosystem with a lot of trash(not even talking about the admin which is hideous ). Yet it's a blazing success in the CMS space, because of 3 things that are insanely overlooked by other CMS developers :<p>- Ease of installation<p>- It runs on a minimal PHP/Apache/Mysql setup (cheap hosting)<p>- It has a great backward compatibly, unlike other solutions that break everything with each major version.<p>If one compares with Drupal for instance, I mean with Drupal, a designer can go really really far without writing a single line of PHP code, aside from a few tags for templates(but it's really light). You have views, CCK and a lot of handy stuff.<p>On the other hand, one cannot customize Wordpress without writing more than a few php tags or downloading a plugin that will mess up with the original db schema. And good luck customizing the admin(easily done with Drupal).<p>I get that Wordpress is more of a "platform" businesses can build products upon, but who would really want to build on that shitty core,with that db schema? one can say i'm negative and unfair in my criticism, but I think my arguments are valid.<p>It's true however that while Wordpress gets a lot of heat from PHP devs, there is no effort from the PHP community to build something like Wordpress with a better codebase, and a better db schema. So Wordpress still has a reason to exist.<p>Reminds me of Javascript : dismissed as an horrible toy by smart people, fits an niche, becomes popular and ubiquitous ,  smart people now have to work on these deployed codebases....