That's probably the best explanation. There is no real alternative to PHP if you want to host cheap and simple. It's also really easy to deploy WordPress to a shared hoster, just by uploading a few files via FTP/etc and setting up a MySQL connection.
Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?
> Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?
I think I just threw up a little, in my mouth...
I don't think there's a viable alternative to PHP. The nerds here, hate it (and they aren't really wrong). I hate it, but it is undisputed God Emperor of Cheap Hosting. There's nothing that even comes close, for simplicity, speed, robustness, cost, and ubiquity. There are millions of pages of support, years of support forums, and hundreds of thousands of people that can work with PHP at an expert level. Despite the hate, PHP is a mature, modern language, still very much under development, and supported by many corporations. Much of the primitive stuff it started with, has been replaced (I think, rather clumsily, but it works).
The simplest hosting solutions have LAMP ("P" being "PHP"), and there are millions of LAMP servers out there. Every single one can run WP, simply by uploading a few files, creating a MySQL DB/User, tweaking a config, and Björn Stronginthearm's your uncle. Or, with things like WPE, you can click on a button in your control panel dashboard.
Also, non-HN-readers can manage just about every aspect of a WP server, once it's set up. People have made careers from that.
This sucks.
I run a couple of sites. I use WP, because it means that I don't have to waste much time, managing them. I could definitely switch over to a static generator (what I would use, if I didn't do WP), or even write my own sites, using handcoded HTML (I have done that, and have even written my own CMSes, in The Dark Ages). I just don't want to have to do that. The moment I walk away from WP, I am sealing my own fate. It will make it ten times as hard to push the sites over to someone else to manage.
I am an indifferent (at best) Web designer. Almost every person here, could probably code circles around me. That means that working on Web sites is painful and slow, detracting from what I'm actually good at.
It looks like you are wanting to argue on some specifics. I probably won't be able to give you what you are looking for.
With me, it had to do with the languages I wrote (C and Perl), that required CGI to publish. CGI did fine, but it's fairly primitive. Just another system text pipe (which, TBH, is pretty much what is going on, under a Webserver).
But for most folks, CGI is unapproachable. That's what PHP gives people. It was so easy to use, that anyone that could edit an HTML file, could also write powerful programs in PHP. It was integrated into the Webserver, not the system (as far as the user was concerned).
At the time I first encountered PHP, ColdFusion was an industry standard for that kind of thing, but it was a commercial product, locked to a single vendor. PHP gave hosting companies a fairly simple package (for free) they could compile into their Webserver, that would give their customers that power.
Nerds have no issue, using things like CGI, but most folks aren't nerds, and we sometimes have a real hard time, understanding that. Nerds that do, often become rich.
You misunderstand, it's more that I have a very limited knowledge of web programming : besides dumb HTML+CSS, only a small project using JQuery and (then bleeding edge) async JavaScript on the frontend, Python on the server, and... CGI for the communication between them.
So I was literally trying to know more. (And I understand a bit better now, thanks.)
Sorry. I consider CGI to be sort of a “failed experiment of the past,” sort of like Server-Side Includes (shtml). What CGI does, is let anything that can write to a pipe, publish on the Web (you could write a web app with Bash).
I think that anything that will interact with remote browsers, should go through a Webserver. Many utilities actually have their own built-in webservers (not sure that’s always a good thing).
Let me rephrase that: It’s not “failed,” per se, but it is inaccessible.
It’s what systems programmers would like, because we don’t like things that get in the way. However, most folks aren’t systems programmers. They want padding and safety nets.
These days everything that would've been CGI is now FastCGI (even PHP). Or in other words, run one server whose only job is to reverse-proxy requests to another server over a slightly different protocol.
It can be used in shared scenarios, but it's nowhere near as automatic as "every file with a particular extension" like PHP...
When Wordpress first came up, PHP was something anyone with $5 could administer, and Python/Ruby required a lot more money and expertise that put them outside the reach of junior hobbyists.
This was before the days of PaaS solutions like AppEngine.
Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?