written by owen on 2026-Jan-28.

I have always wondered why wordpress remains the most popular CMS in the PHP scene after all these years. But in my mind it had always been obvious, I have written about it before; Modern Open Source PHP, OOP, PSR exists not to solve the problems of the web but as a honey trap for new aspiring PHP programmers. A way to generate mindshare by muddying all the simple things with complications that only a framework will be able solve. This kind of "mindshare capture" is very profitable as it allows these frameworks to direct revenue into itself rather than the community. Its a kind of self importance that doesnt need a big user base but rather a big group of paying developers who are enslaved with in it.

It links back to my earlier article called code slavery where instead of the goal being to create solutions, modern PHP frameworks exist merely to create bigger and bigger ecosystems around its own API. Just like google wants everyone to use Android or Apple wants everyone to use an Iphone. Its not because their phone is useful but rather they want eyeballs and captive audiences. Its no longer about solving web problems but more about creating ever deeper rabbit holes for the developers who should be making things and helping users. Users and devs be dammed.

The rabbit holes created are so deep that most devs can never think their way out of it because they are fully surrounded. Some build apartments inside the rabbithole, plugins for other programmers, mini rabbit holes inside the bigger rabbit hole. Then label them as "open source". Most of which are ignored. Trust is not shared amount the members of the rabbithole. Only the paid products control mindshare, everything else must not be trusted. And if some third party plugin gains trust it is quickly cloned and incorporated for the "good of the open source" community. This is the way. Great ideas are first ignored as disruptive then consumed without remuneration or credit.

I have written about composer but connecting it to this article requires a level of introspection into the rabbit hole. If someone is interested in solving problems, they would spend most of their time ensuring that everything they release does exactly that - solves problems. However there is no money in solving problems. The money is in the churn: the constant re-basing, over engineering and complication created by the underlying frameworks. As more CMS tools move to using composer as their only install method, it becomes harder and harder to detect the true size of these systems. Harder for regular users to install them and harder for programmers exist without some kind of package management. The package manager becomes the driver and obfuscates the bloat.

Its not that wordpress is not apart of the composer song and dance - it is, but its more about who the target audience really is. Laravel, Drupal and platforms like it are not interested in making simpler websites that users can install. They exist to create mindshare and keep developers trapped writing plugins and installing tools against their bloated ecosystem. An ecosystem which cannot be pinned down because of its every growing size. If you have issues just hire us and we will help you solve it. It all leads back to the mother ship. If your site breaks its because you havent installed the latest update and you are insecure. It is classic "park at your own risk" development at a large scale.

Casual users and php do-it-yourselfers no longer matter if you can make everything so complicated that they need to hire a developer to built and maintain it. And if you as a platform have all the developers and the tutorials+books then you basically own the farm.

So why isn't Laravel more popular than wordpress? The answer simply is that devs are using Laravel to build customs bespoke apps. its like a house of cards ontop of another ever changing house of cards. or better yet its a rabbit hole inside a rabbit hole which contains houses made of cards. The bigger multi-million dollar projects are kept alive by the core developers or paid experts. Smaller projects just get deprecated or re-based everytime a new version comes out. None of the things built on Laravel ever grow big enough to be better than wordpress. You could clone wordpress exactly in one of these frameworks and it would be 10x as big and take 10x as long to develop. There is no escape. Its not about being better than wordpress - its about trapping devs in bloat so you can sell books.

But being scalable, user friendly, simpler doesn't matter. None of it matters because these frameworks are not for people but instead are for developers to buy into and chew on forever - never being able to break free. The only people who see the bloated code and the PSR standards are the same developers. It is dog fooding 101 - you write code for yourself, that checks itself, that you show to other devs like yourself. Its a great song and dance masterbation that only you can see and keeps only you in check because the PSR standards tell you to do so.

The causal users don't care about the technical details or the unit tests that you spent 2 years writing. The users only care that the website works and they get to do what they want to do. In fact I think PSR was created to keep any independent thought from usurping the mindshare dominance of these huge frameworks. PSR is a way to keep all the modern PHP devs chasing the same ball and falling into the same bloated rabbit hole. Everyone writing the same code in slightly different ways. Controlling vocabulary and the jargon is becoming a profitable way to ensure that nothing get solved. Things just keep going in circles while you syphoned off profits at the edges before the next major version where you can start all over. Modern PHP is the new legacy code.

Conclusion

The fun thing about the dynamic nature of PHP is that you can build anything you want. The side effect of this is that you can also build all kinds of Frankenstein systems that exist as a patch work of things that claim to be modern. In any other compiled language this kind of development would be unsustainable. Modern PHP has allowed framework devs to create thier own hivemind developer hell. And its hungry for more souls. Developer souls, not users.

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