As a user I think it's decent. It provides a word-processory interface, which people are comfortable with (word processors were another wrong-turn imo) so they can easily post their posts and get comments and be perfectly happy. It's massively over-engineered for that, but from the user perspective it does it well.
But as a 'dev' working with a client it's horrible. First off, trying to find a theme that does *most* of what they want and they like the general look of. Sending them test-site links, explaining thoroughly that it's just a theme's test-site, and getting "yeah that looks okay but I'll want my name up the top and the text to be purple" back. Finding a theme is a tedious process and it's never perfect, so it'll need customising, which is where it gets *really* bad.
Some themes come with a (non-standardised, of course) widget to change colours and turn features off and on, which is *good*, except that these ones always end up even harder to customise if what you want to change *isn't* covered by the widget.
So to alter the look of the site it's CSS overrides. Which are always a pain. But WP's HTML and CSS are *nasty*, so it's kludges on kludges on kludges. I hate dealing with software where every single fucking goddamn element on the page has its own (unmemorably named) class. The cascading part of CSS really doesn't work in practise except for the most trivial stuff.
But that's all fine compared to altering functionality. In which case you're doing PHP overrides. Which the themes (if I remember correctly) are already overriding, so if you ever want to change themes you're starting from scratch. And Wordpress is made of one million PHP files and finding which ones (often multiple, to do one thing) you need to override to get the functionality you want is literally the worst experience I've ever had working with software.
And of course, all of these alterations are incredibly fragile. When Wordpress *or* the theme updates, any of them could break. So your best option as a 'dev' is to never update, which is a great thing to encourage.
I ended up refusing to deal with CMSes. I did a few sites, towards the end of when I was doing web stuff, with static site generators, usually Jekyll, which was much more pleasant. But only suitable for people who can get their heads around markdown (again, word processors were a fucking mistake).
But even Jekyll is overly complex now. I ended up, for my own stuff, writing my own static site generator in bash. It's clunky cos I don't know what I'm doing, but it works great for me (and a handful of other people use it, which is gratifying).
I fucking hate wordpress. I wouldn't mind if the end result was amazing but, ultimately, unless you're using it to run an actually dynamic site, what it's doing is pointless. Databasing text so that you can pull it out of the database every time someone visits and dynamically recreate the exact same page for every visitor (yeah, caching will mitigate some of that but still).
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