Kind of stunned at this, though I shouldn't be.

First of all, the title of this piece is all wrong. The article on CMS Critic is... an article on CMS critic. It is not a way to "communicate with WordPress", nor does it try to be, or ever claim it is.

Given's CMS Critic's high standing in the CMS world (which is far beyond the reach of just WP, or even OSS or PHP based systems), and the fact they interviewed Matt earlier in the year - probably means they can reach out if they really wanted. Instead it was just an article, with an opinion.

Given that the article is an opinion piece, it's just insane to complain that it doesn't give detailed feedback about how to change the things that the article has an opinion on. Especially because... that is not the point of an opinion piece!!

I know this is hard to believe, but when someone's JOB is to write about the CMS market, they are not secretly hoping to make contact with the inner-sanctum of WP. They're just doing their job. There is no hidden motive with which to criticise.

1. 2016 theme

It feels... sparce. Also, I completely understand the word "lazy" in this context. It's not talking about the code, but more the thinking behind it. Why isn't this an Angular theme, with a disconnected front-end, loading from the awesome new Restful API? Where's the spark? Where's the pushing the boundaries? Where's the showing people the awesome?

WP Themes used to show what could be done. 2016 'feels' like meh, lets just copy some bits from Medium.

Worse, it feels like something I could do.

2. Plugin directory

Or "Mos Eisley".
It needs a clean sweep.
Coming back to build a WP site this week, and I'm stunned.
So. Much. Crap.

3. Menus

Remember "Decisions not options"? ha, just kidding, here's loads of menus, and notifications, oh wow the notifications. And of course the WP logo/link needs to be the first thing in an install, not the link to the actual website.

The first 3 hours of PHP I've written in an easy 2 years has all been to remove things from the WP admin (including the forced news section - what client wants that??)

4. Akismet / Spam

Akismet, the free version, simply doesn't stop enough. And what it does requires manual handling. Worse, and this is atrocious, in order to be able to moderate spam you also need to have access to edit posts. That's insane!

One of our big sites has a new article every day (twice a week 2 a day), with 1k-1.5k legitimate comments per article, and an easy 10k spam or doesn't meet our CoC.

Akismet fails so badly here. It doesn't understand context.

5. Updates

There *are* too many updates. Plugins are way too big, so every time they update anything, the whole thing needs updated. Take Yoast as an example, it was updated 3 times in 4 days in July, 2 times in 3 days in August. 2 times in 2 days in June. 3 times in 2 days in April. and on it goes...

And that's just one plugin. We have a task in the office where the person who turns up last has to man the WP Updates for that day - because there are updates every day - and the person who clicks update has to fix it if something breaks.

6. Security

It's too light touch. WP was fundamentally designed over 10 years ago. Huge improvements have been made, but in terms of login, account creation, password reset, ftp for updates etc - its the same old. The fact that every line of code is loaded every time any page is hit is crazy. it's just asking for trouble.

Moreover, WordPress has the reputation of "Windows" in terms of security. Doesn't matter if that's fair or not. All of our client SLAs state that not only will WP not be installed on any shared server, it isn't allowed in the same Pub/Pri cloud environment as anything not WP.

And until WP actually does something about that reality, or the perception, it's always going to be viewed in that way.