I’m running multiple static sites for years already and am very happy with it. It has been very reliable.
Until last September I used to encourage non-tech folks to just use WordPress.com and pay for the hosting. It was pricier than DIY solutions, but also I was happy to suggest it to help put $$$ in Automattic's pockets for WordPress development. I'm sad I can't recommend it in good faith anymore.
Trying to teach people to use Git to push an update seems difficult. And teaching them Markdown. And dealing with images.
someorg.wordpress.com is not as nice as someorg.com but there's no domain to be not renewed. There's levels of privileges, etc.
ect ect
AI output is in a frustrating half way place where the results are simultaneously better than an amateur and worse than someone with a few years of professional experience.
Makes it very tempting to use, but unless you're good at attention to detail and reviewing the output, it's also by default[0] producing certain tells that make many people very weary — think of the meme "if you didn't bother to write it, why should I bother to read it".
[0] you can get past this fairly easily, but IMO learning that is a skill that only comes to the kind of technical person who would also not have any trouble learning the markup/markdown anyway
As for forums, those almost don't exist anymore, and contact forms and ecommerce are better off being handled by software designed to do that rather than some plugin shoehorned into an early-2000s PHP blogging platform.
For example, contact forms in Hubspot or Salesforce, and ecommerce with Shopify.
Edit to add: If someone's technical enough to be self-hosting Wordpress the open-source project, I would trust them to do a fine job at selecting a more focused alternative OSS project for those "actual server" needs.
Or if you're really making some big time e-commerce stuff, then you're better off with bespoke solutions than something hacked together with WordPress.
Not disputing the usefulness of the platform, just that it's a risky thing to expose to the Internet.
At that point just write your own HTML and never be beholden to some abstraction framework toolkit corporation cooperative ever again.
This is without going into how you ideally want an image pipeline, sitemaps, cards for twitter and stuff, maybe category pages, …
Yes.
It's all a lot simpler than dealing with some abstraction framework toolkit, at least for me.
Maybe it's because I learned to write websites in the early 2000s where writing your own HTML and CSS was par for the course. You'd also write PHP or Ruby or ASP or something if you wanted to get fancy.
Back in the day I'd have clobbered something together with SSIs to have, at least, a single copy of text to maintain, but that gets old quickly.
A determined and focused person can probably make do with single-post pages and a titles-only styled rss.
Hugo and Zola serve a wider audience.
I would argue that's not a "static" website, but even so that's still nothing some smart usage of PHP includes or the like can't easily solve.
Slap some workflow/approval process.
And you have a product!
And do you know what’s the best part about that? You even made money off of that you can use to purchase the stuff you got ads for! Isn’t that exciting? Thank you for your service!
I'll take the compliment anyway :)