Ask HN: Migrating from static generator to wordpress | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Migrating from static generator to wordpress

5 pointssharmi15 comments

My personal site is not much active but when I have something interesting I tend to post.

https://www.minvolai.com/blog I used to blog using wordpress in 2007. Then I migrated to static generator mynt and have been on this from atleast 5 years. Mynt is not so well maintained now and I plan to move to nikola, another static blog generator (written in python).

On the other hand, most of the web uses wordpress. So if I move back to wordpress, I believe I will have a better understanding of other people's workflows and issues. I do not mind keeping the installation up-to-date etc.

One thing that used to bug me when I was using wordpress, was embedding code snippets as a part of blog content. Wordpress would often replace embedded code symbols with html encodings , like ">" by ">". It got really annoying to open every post where it happens and set it right manually.

So my questions are:

* Has anyone moved a programming blog from static blog generator to wordpress? How is the experience?

* Has anyone faced the code replacement situation recently and if so, how do you handle it?

I worked with WordPress professionally a bit. Personally, I hope to never have to touch it again.

WordPress is designed as a sort of self-hosted SquareSpace. Set it and forget it. The coding style follows this idea by being a huge pile of spaghetti code with no enforced software pattern. The plugins library, while extensive, also follows this philosophy by leaving everything up to the plugin developers. So you end up having a pile of noodles overridden randomly by an SEO plugin that overrides the WordPress dashboard with what I can only describe as a "professional" ransomware prompt if you let the mandatory support license lapse (mandatory being that the plugin is supposedly GPL'd, but impossible to use without a paid license key). And, on top of all this, since it's supposed to be like SquareSpace, the kinds of people who usually use WordPress are the kinds of people who know nothing about technology and constantly look for ways to get functionality cheaply.

As far as personal blogs go, Medium has been looking somewhat nice these days as a public diary of sorts. If you want more control over how your content is used, then you might want to consider either Jekyll or static HTML/CSS in a creative Apache setup.

Why go all the way to WordPress? Maybe look into netlify.com. They have a basic CMS frontend that lets you publish posts via several static site generators with free plans. I'd much rather stick with static sites if I can.

Or try https://appdrag.com a cloud cms with zero maintenance required and hosted on aws

Thanks Sean, will look into Netlify. I am still looking forward to the views of wordpress users.

For static site generators take a look at Jekyll.

For a CMS, maybe consider CraftCMS.

I personally wouldn’t touch WordPress. It is easy to install but i’ve Found it near impossible to change (spaghetti code by design) and don’t trust the plugin code malware-wise and security-wise.

WordPress 4.9... no longer allows you to edit any code through their editor. You have to edit it through FTP. This change screwed my site up badly to the point where I had it so customized, I basically spent a weekend just finding a theme, only uploading bits and pieces of the database at a time, just to get it working again.

I was about ready to switch to Medium.com to let them handle my website... but the did away with custom domains. But it is pretty much now.. I cannot customize anything on WordPress anymore the way I am used to.. and everything has to be done with plugins. I don't mind a few plugins, but there were just some plugins that were unnecessary and I could just write the script myself to handle certain things.

So... I am still using WordPress, this move was done basically to protect people from themselves. But I feel it should have been optional.. don't force me to be unable to edit certain files, especially in the WordPress editor itself. I certainly miss the freedom of being able to write scripts and do as I please with my WordPress install. That is why I'm not on WordPress.com and opted for my own website. Not saying I can't still do some of it, but going forward with WordPress updates.. nothing can guarantee that my scripts will work from version to version.

> WordPress 4.9... no longer allows you to edit any code through their editor.

WordPress 4.9 still allows you to edit your templates through the editor. Although it shows you a warning if you want to do so it is still possible to change and save your templates.

I was never able to edit after... always had the spinning wheel and then tells me that I need to edit it via FTP.

One of my clients currently is moving from CraftCMS to WordPress because the former is too hard to use and maintain.

WordPress is for users who precisely don't want to change code themselves but rather rely on plugins for providing additional features. There's a huge number of high quality WordPress plugins just as there's an even larger number of not so high quality or downright shady or malicious plugins.

Caveat emptor, as with any software you install on your devices. There are resources that help with selecting trustworthy plugins. If you install plugins without so much as a thought though that's a huge security risk because unlike modern operating systems or app stores WordPress itself doesn't really protect you against malicious code.

Can you point me to resources for trustworthy plugins?

IMO trustworthy would likely mean inspectable code.

Sure. From the top of my head:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/limit-login-attempts

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-authenticator/

For all of these - and I suppose this applies to most other WordPress plugins as well - the source code can easily be inspected.

What's your reason for moving back to Wordpress?

Because that is where the target market is.

I don't think I understand. The target market for a blog - for content - has nothing to do with the software you use to display that content. Unless you're publishing on a social network like Medium. But that's not Wordpress.

I think OP is saying that he/she wants to use WordPress because everyone else is seemingly doing it for blogging, regardless of his/her actual needs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com