WordPress Alternatives

I've used Netlify for a while now for a lot of my basic static site customers. You can easily transfer a domain, they have automatic builds when you commit to several different source control vendors like Github or Gitlab.

They have a ton of services and I was using them when they still a startup and Mathias used to personally answer your emails. Now they're pretty big and have a host of different services they offer. Their analytics are still in need of some help, but their services are rock solid and very, very affordable.

They were really the first company to push the idea of JAMSTACK (Javascript, APIs, Markup) and have really been pushing that envelope ever since. They've also acquired several Y Combinator startups recently.

https://www.netlify.com/

If one is looking for a simple/personal blog and wants to write in plain-text Markdown, one should consider Jekyll on GitHub Pages[1]. The beauty is that one does not need to worry about setting up Jekyll on the local machine. Just write and push to Github. If one wants to skip that, just go to GitHub and write there; a version of VSCode is built in there.

This also allows one to carry (take out) their content anywhere on any platform that supports plain text (MarkDown). Browsers can also just render plain-text as it, so if you just drag-drop them on a server, it should render as your website.

I have a pretty large personal site[2], and I hate Jekyll because it takes too long to compile locally, but I’m on it because I don’t let it interfere with my writing.

As for a WordPress replacement/alternative, it is going to be pretty hard to find something as prolific and click-clacky easy as WordPress to start off. It has like two decades of the mother of all kitchen sink built-in for anyone to jump in and rummage something out it.

Update/Edit: Github Pages has also become rock solid stable too. No downtime in the past 3+ years.

1. https://pages.github.com

2. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/

Against all odds and expectations, Movable Type is apparently still around and a thing: https://github.com/movabletype/movabletype

This is a big problem with the "blogging CMS" market.

A technical person who just wants a blog can easily set up a SSG, or even write their own CRUD app, in just a couple of hours. So they don't really need a WordPress alternative.

A non-technical person, on the other hand, will want (if not need) at least a few plugins and themes to set up a blog. Anything that can't be auto-installed on GoDaddy or requires manual file editing and/or shell commands is right out. Most of the alternatives are sorely missing in this department.

none of these look attractive to me … what about a clean fork of WordPress?