Ask HN: Can you help me make an argument against Wordpress? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can you help me make an argument against Wordpress?

9 pointskrmmalik8 comments

I've used wordpress for the last 6 years, with a number of companies, but I've finally had enough of it. It's too bloated, too much work and there are better ways of getting things done.

The problem is, I haven't had a chance to try anything new (i've switched careers), but at the same time I try to persuade others to move away from traditional CMS'es ala Wordpress et all, over to something else such as Static Site Generators and so on. Unfortunately, I don't have much to substantiate the claim.

Is there anyone here that has successfully moved away from Wordpress onto something else and been 'better for it' ?

Why did you move away from Wordpress? How big was/is your site? What tech stack did you move to? Was it worth the move?

Tell me anything. I'd like to share the results with my friends.

Thanks.

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It's difficult to justify calling WordPress bloated when it's just some 200k lines of code and most theme/plugin files are only a couple dozen to hundreds themselves. Compare that to the kinds of frameworks people recommend for starting modern PHP projects yourself, and WordPress is tiny. Symfony for example is 900k lines of code before you've even written "Hello World". Other CMS's are, too, typically much larger than WordPress (e.g. Drupal Core is over 5 times larger).

I use wordpress too, and I too find it bloated, tedious and messy. Why can't I just blog on something that mimicks the final product? I'm curious to try http://ghost.org but meh I don't have the time for that right now. Would love to see any persuasive/compelling responses from others.

You might wish to try postach.io if you don't have time for Ghost, as all you need to do is just create an account and start blogging. :)

I hadn't heard of postach.io before. It looks pretty good - thanks. I take it you use it yourself?

Yes, I do - although there's also the option of ghost.org

I moved my personal site from Wordpress to Octopress a few years ago, which is a small site - approx 70 posts - and gets a small amount of traffic.

Pros:

* Cheaper / simpler hosting - no need for a database, etc. (you can even host on GitHub)

* No updates to install on the server, as you're serving static files

* Less concerns over security

Cons:

* Not as simple to add a new post. With WordPress you can just login, create a new post, and publish. With Octopress you run a rake command, edit post, save, preview, git commit, then git push / rsync.

I've personally never used it, but I've heard great things about Perch (http://grabaperch.com/). It's supposed to be very simple to work with and get a "simple CMS".

Wordpress can be used to do many things. The problem is when you're a developer, sometimes those niche cases of what you want it to do are a pain in the rear. But that's with any framework/CMS.

If your looking for getting back to basics, look at DokuWiki (with the Dokucms template as a gude.) Your not going to see a wide range of options but you will delight in its simplicity of page/user management.

My example (maybe not the best layout, but it works) - http://www.portcommodore.com

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