I've had to run Wordpress against my will a number of times and while it's true that it a hacky mess it's also pretty well documented and as long as you use it as intended the end result is quite usable. It's PHP so pretty well tested deployments, metrics out of the box, individual interpreters for customers work well, it can be chrooted. Basic stuff like this has been built in with PHP for a decade.
> WP expect you to install it such that it can modify its install folder
Only if you want to have your users install plugins and modify the software with the web control panel. That may be the whole reason why you chose Wordpress, of course. Otherwise it runs well in a read only environment, apart from the attachments folder, and it is also documented.
> It will use incoming requests to trigger "cron" jobs
This is optional, for people who ran it on shared web hosts and didn't have access to crontab. It's all documented in the install instructions.
> It falls apart under any kind of load,
Well, yes. That's unfortunately true for all popular CMS software. It's a similar situation as with Gtk and Qt which are all flaming garbage under the hood. As an X11 user I accept that but I don't have to like it.
It's not noticeable for end users because as you realized in is intended to run with caching. That's the one big thing that should be better documented in the installation instructions. I had to evaluate half a dozen caching schemes just to choose one that seems to work well and is popular enough. There really should be one straightforward way to do it.
> WP expect you to install it such that it can modify its install folder
Only if you want to have your users install plugins and modify the software with the web control panel. That may be the whole reason why you chose Wordpress, of course. Otherwise it runs well in a read only environment, apart from the attachments folder, and it is also documented.
> It will use incoming requests to trigger "cron" jobs
This is optional, for people who ran it on shared web hosts and didn't have access to crontab. It's all documented in the install instructions.
> It falls apart under any kind of load,
Well, yes. That's unfortunately true for all popular CMS software. It's a similar situation as with Gtk and Qt which are all flaming garbage under the hood. As an X11 user I accept that but I don't have to like it.
It's not noticeable for end users because as you realized in is intended to run with caching. That's the one big thing that should be better documented in the installation instructions. I had to evaluate half a dozen caching schemes just to choose one that seems to work well and is popular enough. There really should be one straightforward way to do it.