[thisisjaymehta]

To be honest, I never found WordPress easy to use. It's all flowers and rainbows as long as I can find good themes and plugins. However, it starts going south as soon as I need to make a very small custom change.

[thomasfromcdnjs]

I've always considered myself an above average web developer, my friends would always have Wordpress websites, and ask me if I can just tweak a few things.

Without hesitation, I'd proclaim I could easily make those changes!

Then I'd load their site, load their plugin/theme code and css files, struggle for hours to get the desired effect, and even if I got it to work, I would break every other part of their site.

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Denigrating anecdote aside, good job Matt, loved the story at the end.

[pests]

I had the exact same thing happen years ago and I've never felt so helpless. Simple banner / color change. Ended up rebuilding the entire site from scratch it was easier.

Once you spend some time in the codebase and understand a bit of its legacy history it gets easier over time. A lot of plugins and solutions are aimed towards non-technical users and a lot of overlap. Where we might just write up some custom HTML others might install 3 plugins to make it work.

[Helmut10001]

Initial setup of wordpress is super easy, but it gets very hard to maintain after a while. Updates require manual intervention, themes must be fixed, plugins deprecate. All of this adds a burden I am not willing to accept, which is why I moved all my sites to Hugo/Jekyll/Mkdocs (etc.) since about 2017.

[throw5345346]

Have you looked at WP-CLI?

A lot of the stuff you want to do can be maintained at the command line. And it even gives you a way to do some fleet management.

[paulryanrogers]

Automated updates are easier now, at least with well tested plugins and themes.

[jsxlite]

I switched to ghost, at first it was a bit rough around the edges, but since they made the global cli. It has being quite nice. For blogs, would rather use that than WP. Of course I also prefer JS instead of PHP.