What if WordPress Wasn’t an Option?
Written by David Peralty in
9 Comments
I have been thinking about what the blogosphere, and my career would be like if WordPress didn’t exist. If Matt and friends had failed to produce any tangible results and improvements, which software would we all be using? Would we be blogging at all?
Many people will probably assume that some other software would have taken WordPress’ place, and until it changed its payment scheme, I would have said that Movable Type would be that software, but I have a feeling most of us would be using the various publishing scripts that we used before WordPress, as well as the free options that exist today in Blogger and others.
The effects of WordPress not existing would be interesting, and I think you’ll all agree that the blogosphere wouldn’t be the same, not even close.
What do you think it would be like without the existence of WordPress? Which blogging software would you be using, and do you think it would exist in its current form without the influence of WordPress? Am I giving WordPress too much credence in building and growing the blogosphere into what it is today? Let me know in the comments below.
I think perhaps we would all be using hosted solutions. Perhaps Blogger and it’s partially self-hosted option, as that existed before, but most other options really built on the success of WordPress.
I guess it would something else that doesn’t exist right now.
You’d likely be using something you paid for (see Type, Movable and Engine, Expression)
And without a decent localized commenting engine (see Scan, Halo).
Life would end. Seriously.
Ok…life wouldn’t end, but it would seem like it.
Ok, life would be the same and we’d be using something called Googlepress.
But there was WordPress, so Google had to buy Blogger, which is lame and hasn’t done anything special.
So thank God for WordPress.
Well, I’d be DEAD.
Dead dealing with the messy and frustrating Joomla.
Maybe Drupal would pick up well.
But frankly, yes, without WordPress, blogging won’t be what blogging is today.
Back in the 90s services like Tripod and Geocities thrived. If WordPress hadn’t come on the scene, then I would imagine that those services would have continued to evolve. Perhaps they never would have become blog-like, but I think that they would have expanded their functionality enough that people would have continued to use them much more than they do today.
Since I’m using WordPress more as a quasi-CMS than a blog, I’d probably use something like Joomla or Drupal.