So, earlier this year I was helping a friend fix their blog. A local news site, run by a middle-aged not very technical woman. She'd taken it over from the previous owners a few years ago, and every now and again things break. She's paying over the odds for hosting, and the support people are .. adequate, but not really going to fix everything for her. My two thoughts going into fixing it were: - wow, this Wordpress…
Why I created Banner Blog
61–70 of 90 posts
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#62Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#63Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#64That’s cool you made this site. But I don’t think Wordpress sucks at all. It’s great in that it’s open source, runs everywhere, is easy to use, and super extensible. I still recommend it to people who want to blog and it works out well. It’s especially nice as it doesn’t lock you into a saas like wix or square space or lots of other $10+/month services. Personally, I just like markdown and jekyll as it’s easy enough…
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#65So, earlier this year I was helping a friend fix their blog. A local news site, run by a middle-aged not very technical woman. She'd taken it over from the previous owners a few years ago, and every now and again things break. She's paying over the odds for hosting, and the support people are .. adequate, but not really going to fix everything for her. My two thoughts going into fixing it were: - wow, this Wordpress…
And a good static blog like Hugo or Jekyll will effectively last forever or as long as the hosting bills are paid.
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#66That’s cool you made this site. But I don’t think Wordpress sucks at all. It’s great in that it’s open source, runs everywhere, is easy to use, and super extensible. I still recommend it to people who want to blog and it works out well. It’s especially nice as it doesn’t lock you into a saas like wix or square space or lots of other $10+/month services. Personally, I just like markdown and jekyll as it’s easy enough…
But, if you're using WordPress to publish a simple website, I think the most recent versions are great. The new Guntenberg full site editor is easy to use and it lets you customize your entire website easily, without the need to rely on custom code or, even worse, custom page builders.
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#67So, earlier this year I was helping a friend fix their blog. A local news site, run by a middle-aged not very technical woman. She'd taken it over from the previous owners a few years ago, and every now and again things break. She's paying over the odds for hosting, and the support people are .. adequate, but not really going to fix everything for her. My two thoughts going into fixing it were: - wow, this Wordpress…
And a good static blog like Hugo or Jekyll will effectively last forever or as long as the hosting bills are paid.
I'm using a SSG for my personal website, where it's no problem for me to manually write markdown files and run a command to build and deploy, but this will not work for sites I'm making for and/or with other non-technical people.
In those cases I'll have to set up some headless CMS, like Netlify CMS (now Decap), Strapi, Directus etc. This means I have to additionally deploy the CMS somewhere (even Netlify CMS, now Decap requires an authentication backend), maybe manage some database – Then because content changes from the CMS need to trigger a site rebuild I need to set that up, use something like Netlify or Vercel or GitHub actions to build and deploy the site, trigger builds with webhooks or via git, or put together some build system myself, it's just a really annoying amount of complexity just to get a simple static site that people can contribute content to in an easy way.
My absolute dream would be an affordable (like managed Wordpress) CMS solution that allows content authoring for non-technical people with a nice UI but then also takes care of building a static site from a connected git repo on every content change and deploys it to some global CDN, similar to Netlify. So I can build my website in Astro/11ty/Hugo/Jekyll or whatever static site generator technology I want but still make it easy to collaborate on content. Netlify was really close to making this possible but unfortunately they didn't seem interested in maintaining / improving it, probably since it isn't really an "enterprise" kind of problem.
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#68That’s cool you made this site. But I don’t think Wordpress sucks at all. It’s great in that it’s open source, runs everywhere, is easy to use, and super extensible. I still recommend it to people who want to blog and it works out well. It’s especially nice as it doesn’t lock you into a saas like wix or square space or lots of other $10+/month services. Personally, I just like markdown and jekyll as it’s easy enough…
But people need hosting, and that's primarily the selling point of using a paid closed source WYSIWIG alternative.
WP gets a bad rap because people buy terrible shared hosting to keep it cheap. At some point they will also need to open up Cpanel or some domain management UI to fix something and UX-wise it's downhill from there.
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#69So, earlier this year I was helping a friend fix their blog. A local news site, run by a middle-aged not very technical woman. She'd taken it over from the previous owners a few years ago, and every now and again things break. She's paying over the odds for hosting, and the support people are .. adequate, but not really going to fix everything for her. My two thoughts going into fixing it were: - wow, this Wordpress…
Re: Why I created Banner Blog
#70That’s cool you made this site. But I don’t think Wordpress sucks at all. It’s great in that it’s open source, runs everywhere, is easy to use, and super extensible. I still recommend it to people who want to blog and it works out well. It’s especially nice as it doesn’t lock you into a saas like wix or square space or lots of other $10+/month services. Personally, I just like markdown and jekyll as it’s easy enough…