If you don’t like the base code of WordPress, develop a custom theme and edit the code?
So I’ll have to develop an entire CMS from scratch then? Because the theme is the least of your worries… in fact the theme is probably the only “decent” code in there.
I’m speaking about WordPress.org in particular, which is completely open source, which you run of either a host’s server or your own. Not Wordpress.com, which I would agree, the codebase isn’t THAT great…
I’d argue for the opposite. With the hosted service, I don’t have to care how bad or vulnerable the code is. I just pay a monthly fee and get service in exchange. I don’t have to worry about maintaining it, reinstalling the server when it inevitably gets compromised, etc.
I would say that Ghost is designed purely for blogging. Great for news/review sites, but poor for when you want it to do other things
Wordpress is designed for blogging too. Just like WP, you can hack Ghost to do other things but it’ll always be a hack. I’d suggest a custom website if you need to do anything more than a blog with a few static pages. Neither Ghost nor Wordpress are particularly well-suited for non-blogging usage, although I’d say it’s much easier to extend Ghost with custom code (it’s just an Express.js app) than it is to extend Wordpress.
My biggest issue with WP is its horrible codebase that leads to things like this. And no, I’m not saying it’s bad because it’s PHP - there is a way to do proper PHP, but Wordpress is definitely not it.