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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

When would one choose WP over a static site generator? I just want to publish. I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that.

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Today's static site generators are simply not fit for mass consumption. Even Jekyll—among the most polished and popular—immediately presents anyone stumbling onto its landing page with a facsimile of a terminal window with 3 inscrutable commands. And the kicker is that even if a prospective "customer" who was previously unacquainted with the command line managed to find their system's terminal emulator to open it up and enter the first command, it will almost certainly fail! What the jekyllrb.com folks gloss over is that there's an "implicit step zero"[1], and if you selected a random, college-educated writer, artist, etc, from a crowd, they are simply on average not actually in the audience for Jekyll or any other contemporary static site generator, despite how slick jekyllrb.com might look (and despite what delusions the "just learn how GitHub Pages works" crowd may hold).

1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-java...

Despite how toxic it is, Twitter is very simple: get account, follow a few people, and you get a text field where you can write stuff, hit "Publish", and you can reach your audience. Even a senile old man who wonders if injecting disinfectant might be worthwhile can use it.

Forcing people to register a domain and choose a template is "too much work" compared to that.

This describes my experience with Hugo. I ran into not only an implicit zero step, but many other intermediate steps that were not explicit in the documentation. My decision for Hugo was influenced by the clear "getting started" type of instructions on their website. I got a bit frustrated in the end, so rolled back to WordPress.

Thanks for relating this story. It's good to be able to point to comments that serve as concrete examples.

One of the things I mentioned in that post is folks' tunnel vision—in these cases, tunnel vision on the parts of the people associated with the project who are unable to see the actual number of hurdles that an outsider will encounter. The post on the Light Table blog[1] that I referenced lays this out, too. Its title "Pain We Forgot" is almost self-explanatory.

1. http://lighttable.com/2014/05/16/pain-we-forgot/

> I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that.

You mean like running your own webserver? Why would I do that instead of just getting a web host that'll take care of all of the sysadmin for you?

With a lot of web hosting platforms all you'll need is to just press a button on a web site, then all you'll have to deal with is the wordpress interface

Part of my current job is handling the technical side of managing Wordpress sites (we have people who do the design/content writing/page building, but I get pulled in for "why isn't this plugin working" or "why is the site slow" type stuff).

For my personal sites I've always done something custom or a static site generator. That definitely requires some more in-depth setup on the frontend, but the long-term maintenance is drastically reduced compared to Wordpress. Sure you don't need to know the command line, but unless you log in weekly to check for plugin updates, make sure you properly vet your plugins, and either get lucky or spend a bunch of time on site optimization, your site will probably be slow and, at some point, get hacked.

You can pay for more hands-on hosting that includes managing a lot of that stuff, but all of a sudden the costs get a lot higher. For a personal blog, I don't want to pay $30/month for hosting.

For what it's worth, I had to make this decision recently and decided to use Publii, which is a gui-based CMS for static sites. I hook it into Netlify, and then I can edit content on my computer and push it to the web with one button. And, since the Publii client lives on my machine, there's no admin portal exposed to the internet.

I use GitHub Pages and a static site generator like Hugo. It's a little more code, but this is Hacker News.

You can publish from any device that can load the WP web interface (or run an app built to talk to WP), instead of having to be at the one device that has the generator and the source files and everything else.

You don’t have to ever touch the command line or FTP or Git or anything technical like that. You can if you want to but nowadays it’s a one-click affair in the control panel of most hosting services. Who will also probably auto-install some cache and security plugins for you because this saves them a shit-ton of support tickets. Yes, YOU are comfortable with all this technical shit but most people are not.

WordPress has had auto-updates for years and years. You only have to manually intervene to upgrade it when they do a major version bump that may break things.

WordPress has a lot more themes available than any static site generator ever will.

WordPress has a ton of plugins to do stuff, some simple, some complex.

WP is accessible to the masses who just want to publish. It's not the pretties, but most people once set up can get it to do what they want it to do and start playing around with stuff.

Generally speaking, the HN audience is not the typical audience we have at StartABlog.com, but WP "just works" well enough for most people.

So far, getting Jekyll publishing to Github Pages has been way more complicated than I expected it to be... I know WordPress pretty well. With caching and automatic plugin updates, it's pretty low maintenance.

Nothing about Jekyll + Github Pages feels "no maintenance" yet.

Don't install Wordpress. Pay for a hosted/managed blog. Wordpress.com (or one of the others).

Static blogs mostly suck because they have no UI for the user. You're generally required to run your own text editor, manage all files yourself, run some build scripts, deal with the errors. Oh, and likely you need to be on a PC/Mac instead of a phone or tablet so less options.

OTOH Wordpress requires constant maintenance. Like literally every month or more often you're required to install updates and if you install any plugins you're required to stay on top of those too. I got off wordpress for precisely those reasons. I run a static blog but, in part because of the friction vs WordPress I rarely post anymore.

Speaking for myself, Wordpress's theme ecosystem is unbeatable, even if you just want a static site.

With some minor work you can set up Wordpress to automatically update itself on a 5 USD shared hosting. Just get a no-nonsense theme and keep the plugins to an absolute minimum.

Because the theming and plugins ecosystem is unbeatable. For static sites, you could use something like WP2Static and have the best of both worlds.

I can't speak for or against WordPress in specific but there is often a need for patching even if you somehow had mythical bug free code and keep things simple there may be compatability with say IPv6 to maintain or what was good enough for the day may now be a sick joke like relying on passwords for cryptographic security.

While not the easiest thing (it could be made easier though) I run a Wordpress instance in a local VM, that then publishes static to S3. Works pretty swell.

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