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I think it'd best to just stay. I see one of two likely things happening:

1. Matt comes to his senses and formally secedes his control of the WordPress Foundation and WordPress OSS to a qualified group of people.

2. He doesn't and the project gets forked to something that gets traction and will be immediately compatible.

This space grew into a bunch of different sub-cutures:

- static website generators (Hugo, etc)

- WYSIWYG editors (Wix, Squarespace)

- Frontends (NextJs, etc) backed by Headless CMS (Strapi, firebase, etc)

There really isn't a good spiritual successor currently. Someone should clone the UX of WP Admin panel, plugins, etc and drop the worst tech debt. Base it on React and make it really easy to deploy.

(edit: formatting)

Just stay with Wordpress, if you like WordPress. It's a vast community. Nothing is even close in terms of marketshare and popularity.

Most people do not care about this drama. And they dont want to care about it because it is their golden goose and customers are used to it.

Yes, some people do care, and yes they are very vocal. And yes there are a lot for those voices here.

Just look at X.

Is still around and still has an extreme amount of users. and it looks like some of folks that switched to Mastodon are not loving it.

Now personally I want WordPress to die because its a nightmare of code.

I find the data schema pretty good. Now with Pods it takes care of extending the schema. The back-end code is decent.

The front end story is different. But after I quit using plugins and started doing a lot of my own coding it is somewhat better but the layers upon layers upon layers of CSS is still a nightmare.

I dont believe the world will accommodate my wish on WordPress.

I also want social media to die. I dont belevive the world will accommodate me on that either.

I have been using kirby (https://getkirby.com/) for all my websites with great success the last few years. It's super stable, flexible, under active development and has a great ecosystem.

Can't recommend it enough.

> What's the best alternative to WordPress right now after all the drama?

Probably WordPress. The user-base is so huge that you'll be in good company. There will be an easy migration to whatever the future version is that Matt doesn't have the ability to supply chain attack.

I moderately frequently wonder what is next for me after WordPress. The drama has nothing to do with it though. I don't use WP Engine (have long thought they seemed off), and I don't see the drama causing wordpress.org or wordpress.com to fall.

Is Drupal still a thing?

I have always considered Drupal to be a pretty industrial-strength system, but quite complex.

One of the nice things about Drupal, is that you could customize the backend. I have always hated WP's backend.

Same boat.

As we all realize, WordPress itself is not an immaculate piece of code, but it's the plugin library that makes it. But we now know that even the plugins themselves are liable to hijacking from within.

While it would be nice to start from scratch with a modern, better CMS - the reality is going to be something like ClassicPress but using only premium, manually installed plugins.

http://payloadcms.com -- I'm all in after 12 years on WP.

I'm a Technical Director of a design/web agency (small scale, I still build one out of every 3 or so sites). We use Sanity + Next JS (or Sanity + Remix more recently) in a repeatable way. I used to use WP a long time ago, and even then I had my own setup to use twig templating, my own image resizing solution, etc.

I have been considering pouring energy into this problem or at least offering advice, our approach is definitely bespoke and not scalable in the way WP is, but I've long thought the middle ground is in need of ~something~.

Statamic: https://www.statamic.com

As a JavaScript person, you will probably want to start using JavaScript frontend frameworks like React/Next.js, Vue/Nuxt.js, Astro, etc. These frameworks allow you to build very fast websites, without page reload.

You can connect these frontend frameworks with a Headless CMS which is, ideally, open-source and written in JavaScript/TypeScript too. This way, you can customize both the frontend and the CMS using the same programming language.

We created Strapi, the most popular open-source Headless CMS, to replace legacy stacks with full JS stacks: from the frontend framework to the CMS.

Astro. It's not the same, it's a static site generator, but with a few edge functions for server-side stuff if you need it. Deploys to Cloudflare or another CI/CD environment for free.

The biggest difference for daily use is you don't get an editor. You can pick your markup language (markdown being the most popular) then it's just files. If you're a developer this should be natural.

I have a few blogs running Ghost and really like it. Plugin and theme ecosystem is nowhere near Wordpress size. However, Ghost is much easier to modify and use IMO, maybe because I'm more comfortable in javascript ecosystem than PHP.

https://ghost.org/

let me vouch for 11ty.dev, i love it. it is simple, easy to use, and slim. you don't have to worry about fighting the million dogs around and if that seems like to much. just go and use raw html, i think that ever since i've been using raw html i've actually been publishing more blogposts

I say we bring back phpNuke

I think it’s probably best just to stay with wordpress.

I just made my own "blogging" platform, where I simply render markdown files using PHP: https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog

I am also using Ghost on a different site, I like their clean editor.

WordPress isn't going anywhere, even if it's via a fork. It's too large and has so many contributors. It may lose some market share over this, but there's a massive, vested interest in at least keeping the spirit and general code base of it alive. Matt bit off more than he can chew, but I wouldn't worry too much about it at the moment. I think it's very possible that during the discovery phase of the lawsuit that Matt is forced out entirely. Not many companies want a massive legal liability at the helm.

Thanks for asking this question! I asked this a couple of weeks ago (Ask HN: What's a Good Alternative to WordPress https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41731867) and I hope people keep the discussion up.

I was also hoping that Ghost would become much larger than it has.

If I was going to bother now I'd start at static content and work back from that to a solution. Be that a static site generator or another tool which is scraped into static, but nothing you have to host anywhere other than a cheap CDN. The maintenance overhead of CMS platforms over the years have been a killer and the attack surface awful.

Squarespace. I know that sounds insane, but Squarespace.

Used WP for 7 years and now Squarespace in its place for 5.

The builder has gotten so much better in the last 3 years, and I am very impressed. The plugin library is expanding at a faster clip now, too.

> What's the best alternative to WordPress

To do what?

For blogs, static-site generators (Eleventy, Astro, or Hugo). For CMS, a combination of a headless CMS with something on the front (e.g. Eleventy + CloudCannon). For ecommerce, dunno, Shopify?

0. Install Airplane Mode on your WordPress and keep it enabled

1. Try ClassicPress

2. Move to Drupal

3. See if you like something else. E.g. BoltCMS, OctoberCMS, or one of the october forks.

4. Go back to Joomla

5. Quit your job and do something you'd like to be doing

There is the Erlang based Zotonic.com which has a Wordpress like feel.

If you want something simple, try this one: https://www.microfeed.org/

Eleventy if you're a JavaScript person maybe?

I've moved my personal site/blog over to Grav. I've done some small work with Statamic before and loved it.

For those of us out of the loop, can someone please share a summary of the drama?

I have always liked Expression Engine, but it looks like they have done yet another licensing / price change.

It is confusing.

I would like to think that Core is open source and free but fromt the site it appears that the "control panel" is limited to 1 user in the core / free version?

I have not used it in a long while but last time I did it was insanely fast.

WordPress is open source and free to use no matter how many users yo have.

https://expressionengine.com/

If you don't want a simple commenting system, go for Hugo.

Perhaps Joomla? As WP, it's PHP based.