Not really, wordpress is a bit of nightmare to code upon and buying plugins and themes can result in incompatibility issues and vulnerabilities. I think Medium is easier, but it’s a walled platform.
Sorry to be argumentative, but it just isn't. It's PHP, and you probably don't need to code anything at all. You also don't need many plugins. Incompatibility issues and vulnerabilities just aren't a thing - as long as you keep stuff up to date and don't install a thousand dodgy plugins, you'll be fine.
And yes, this is what I do: maintaining 50+ sites for clients, so I have been round the block a few times, not just making this up.
It’s funny, I see it as entirely the other way round.
I see many on HN as being sort of “automatically negative” about Wordpress and php and unable to see that there are actually some times when they’re totally the right tools for the job.
I’d be the last person to suggest anyone use Wordpress for everything - yes, I happen to have a niche that is about this tool, and I like it and am passionate about it, and for what we do it’s highly relevant and very much the right tool - but we’re also very pragmatic about decision making.
What I see so much in developer land is that certain trends drive strategy. It’s so often not the boring, known, stayed tool which wins the day but the bleeding edge one which actually isn’t as good a fit.
As I say in a comment lower down here - the tradeoffs to me here are: no feed, no comments, no categories, no OG tags, no API - all of which are out of the box with Wordpress.
