I had a love-hate relationship with Wordpress from the beginning.
Yes, I too basically got my true start in dynamic web development by downloading Wordpress, running it under a WAMP/LAMP stack, toying with the code, and eventually writing some plugins. My coding skills back then were TERRIBLE, but even at that time I had a sense that Wordpress was actually quite a mess under the hood. The database design was pretty bizarre in particular. Fast forward almost 20 years later and I'm a senior web developer, and my opinion of Wordpress has not changed. That doesn't mean Wordpress is bad, because on the surface it does its job very well, but it was (and probably still isn't) the pinnacle of well-written software, and it's not a coincidence that there were vulnerability reports being issues all the time for it.
Wordpress was awesome in high school, the times before StackOverflow, MDN, YouTube, etc. It was a "framework" before frameworks were cool. One of the big selling points for Wordpress was that it was far more approachable than competing CMS softwares like Joomla and Drupal. I tried to figure both of those out back then, and I just utterly despised them. You could do a ton with Wordpress out of the box because, for the most part, you just wanted to have pages for things, a blog section, CSS, and a way to extend functionality. That said, I'm so glad I never have to use it again.
Yes, I too basically got my true start in dynamic web development by downloading Wordpress, running it under a WAMP/LAMP stack, toying with the code, and eventually writing some plugins. My coding skills back then were TERRIBLE, but even at that time I had a sense that Wordpress was actually quite a mess under the hood. The database design was pretty bizarre in particular. Fast forward almost 20 years later and I'm a senior web developer, and my opinion of Wordpress has not changed. That doesn't mean Wordpress is bad, because on the surface it does its job very well, but it was (and probably still isn't) the pinnacle of well-written software, and it's not a coincidence that there were vulnerability reports being issues all the time for it.
Wordpress was awesome in high school, the times before StackOverflow, MDN, YouTube, etc. It was a "framework" before frameworks were cool. One of the big selling points for Wordpress was that it was far more approachable than competing CMS softwares like Joomla and Drupal. I tried to figure both of those out back then, and I just utterly despised them. You could do a ton with Wordpress out of the box because, for the most part, you just wanted to have pages for things, a blog section, CSS, and a way to extend functionality. That said, I'm so glad I never have to use it again.