Is Wordpress a no-code tool?
I love Wordpress.
I built all my sites with Wordpress.
I even built a full product using only Wordpress plugins and Zapier.
But why is Wordpress always left off so many lists of no-code tools? Seem to me like it gets punished for simply being too early to the party.
Like...15 years too early.
I met someone recently who was using 6-7 different apps to do something that one single FREE Wordpress plugin already did. She had used a list of no-code apps from a popular curated list, but had NEVER EVEN HEARD of Wordpress.
What gives?
Trending on Indie Hackers
IMHO
WordPress is no code solution
There are so many WordPress themes, builders, plugins so you don't really need any no code solutions most of the time.
The best part: WordPress is free to use and all nocode solutions usually SAAS type.
I'd agree that maybe Wordpress being too early to the party is why it get's left out so much
I have a SaaS built on WordPress. Most of the front-end is no-code, but I still am kind of in the boat that some coding is still usually required to get a decent product out.
You can do quite a lot without coding by using stuff like Memberpress to handle subscriptions and Elementor to provide the front-end experience
There are some plugins in Wordpress that help to make this tool available without any code. This is the reason I use this tool because I like to have important and valuable tools for my projects. Wordpress development services always turn out to be the right resource in such cases, and that's why I manage to have positive results when I try to solve some issues using this tool. I think that such a recommendation might set a new record for you in the successful processing of deals.
As a software engineer for 14 years now, I can tell you from an engineering perspective why people wouldn't be eager to use PHP and even Wordpress. Wordpress is most likely still the most used CMS ever, exactly due to reasons you mentioned. It rarely requires any manual modifications.
On the contrary, PHP as a language, which is still very popular due to historical reasons, simply became redundant and beaten up by some languages which are simply in every sense superior. Go, even Node, etc.
Lastly, IT community is notorious for wanting to use "latest" stuff all the time. There are memes online where e.g. there is a a new Javascript framework release every time you go to a toilet.
While I'm by no means fan of PHP or Wordpress, I'd absolutely pick it as a choice over many of those modern "headless" solutions, that at at the end of the day, turn into a complexity circus.
One reason why you would want to use those new headless solutions is that you end up with a static site, which is super fast, SEO friendly, etc.
Anyway, Wordpress and the fact that it's no longer mentioned much is the side-effect of the IT community. It's still an amazing tool if you want to bootstrap something or build a semi-generic system with standard types of features. And even often, if you want to go beyond that, extending the system by hiring someone to write a plugin for it isn't the most difficult thing to do.