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WordPress Alternatives

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Re: WordPress Alternatives

#51

Post by kmeisthax »

Matt Mullenweg is being an asshat about WP Engine (and in general) but that doesn't mean you have to jump off WordPress. That's actually the power of the GPL: it's enshittification resistant. The flipside of this is that you can't stop freeloading. In fact, freeloading is a feature, not a bug.

Now, if Automattic had CLA ownership over 100% of WordPress, I'd actually be scared, because they could strip the GPL off of new releases and lock the system down. But as far as I'm aware WordPress's copyright ownership is distributed, so Automattic can't just change the license to the Fuck You, Pay Me Public License and rugpull the whole community.

The worst part about this drama is that Matt's not even wrong. WP Engine is kinda shit[0]. But Matt's behavior is extremely unprofessional and he's making WP Engine into the victim of an extortion campaign.

[0] If you're wondering, the thing that makes it shit is not that they disable revisions. It's that they have significant reliability issues, both with their shared and dedicated offerings, and their support teams do not have visibility into their systems to fix those issues.

Re: WordPress Alternatives

#52

Post by tylershuster »

Drupal should be the obvious choice here. Still PHP-based, still fieldable entities, and a much saner data structure with infinite extensibility. It gets weird hate on HN so I expect that kind of pushback but hey, it's put food on my family's table for more than 6 years and powers some huge and popular sites so I'm not concerned.

Re: WordPress Alternatives

#53

Post by kioleanu »

tylershuster wrote: post #52

Drupal should be the obvious choice here. Still PHP-based, still fieldable entities, and a much saner data structure with infinite extensibility. It gets weird hate on HN so I expect that kind of pushback but hey, it's put food on my family's table for more than 6 years and powers some huge and popular sites so I'm not concerned.

It gets weird hate because it has (had?) an insanely steep learning curve and no setup looked like the other. With wordpress at least, it's pretty consistent across plugins and implementations and very easy to pick up

Re: WordPress Alternatives

#54

Post by Brajeshwar »

marcosscriven wrote: post #34
Brajeshwar wrote: post #23

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 anywhe…

What do you do about images?

There are two ways I have done and both worked for me. It is outlined in my article https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/#q-what-abou... and here is the gist.

1. Move all of your images and static assets (zip, downloads, pdfs, videos) that are not part of WordPress textual content to something like S3+Cloudfront. Maintain that as in a sub-domain `https://static.brajeshwar.com/` Now, start using it in your writing as `https://static.brajeshwar.com/2024/beautiful-picture.webp”>`. This makes it easy and allows you to switch WordPress hosting providers in minutes if not seconds. In my case, around late 2000s and early 2010s, I keep getting warned by Media Temple (mt) of the bandwidth and so Amazon’s S3 came to the rescue.† WordPress plugins are a galore that does the re-direct. That solved multiple problems - not tied down to a particular hosting provider, a CDN that is simple and cheap. Thus, moving out of WordPress with the text that contains those links will continue to just work.

2. Once you move to Static HTMLs, in my case, I felt that it makes more sense to just have them together in one folder — `brajeshwar.com` with everything in it — all the files. I also tend to ask the question and try answering, “Can I move out easily?” That has let me to not use images and other non-essential contents as much as I can avoid. An article/post should continue to work and be meaningful even if the images fails.

† My website was kinda of a deal back then. Now, CloudFlare claims that my website does about 4-5GB a month in bandwidth. This is after I have deleted many, delegated most downloads to Github, and to S3+ CloudFront sub-domains such as `cdn.oinam.com` and `archives.oinam.com`. During the days when (mt) complains is when it hits like 50GB a month on downloads, etc.

In all of this, these days, I pay single digit dollar every month to maintain my entire personal website and the remnants of its past. I don’t want the links from Adobe, Google, Wikipedia, the Chinese, the Russians, etc. to end up in a 404.

Re: WordPress Alternatives

#55

Post by tylershuster »

kioleanu wrote: post #53
tylershuster wrote: post #52

Drupal should be the obvious choice here. Still PHP-based, still fieldable entities, and a much saner data structure with infinite extensibility. It gets weird hate on HN so I expect that kind of pushback but hey, it's put food on my family's table for more than 6 years and powers some huge and popular sites so I'm not concerned.

It gets weird hate because it has (had?) an insanely steep learning curve and no setup looked like the other. With wordpress at least, it's pretty consistent across plugins and implementations and very easy to pick up

Must be "had" — I've used it since D8 first came out and while there's weirdness, it's never been anything beyond what WordPress threw at me.

In terms of setup, it's just like — enter database credentials and start making pages. There's plenty of themes out here and HN users aren't stupid — everyone knows how to compile their own CSS and use composer if they want to.

Re: WordPress Alternatives

#56

Post by Brajeshwar »

freosam wrote: post #49
marcosscriven wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do about images?

I've done this sometimes with hosting images and other large files on a combination of Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive, and Zenodo. Flickr costs money, but it feels like it's worth it given I'm using Netlify and all the others for free. I know some people use S3 services for hosting images, but then you have to worry about generating your own thumbnails etc. and it's trickier.

> I know some people use S3 services for hosting images, but then you have to worry about generating your own thumbnails etc. and it's trickier.

This is one reason why I started asking, “Is this image really needed for this article.” As for the thumbnail generation, I used to have a few Photoshop actions that I just click and be done with.

Now, I just manually optimize the few images I uses in such a way that it is somewhere in the middle -- CSS can still shrink it as a thumbnail but the original isn't that too large either. Something like that.

If you still maintain that a popular website to worry about images that much, I would try out CloudFlare image service.

Re: WordPress Alternatives

#57

Post by Brajeshwar »

mikae1 wrote: post #39
Brajeshwar wrote: post #23

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 anywhe…

I wish more people came across https://getpublii.com as a middle ground between full-on SSG and a hosted CMS. It's so damn good at this point.

Yes, yes, I was there Gandalf. I was there 3,000 years ago. I tried Publii during its early release or beta (I think it was popular on HN). Unfortunately, I felt that it encapsulated too much for me and my site just died -- similar issues with waiting for my tea to boil while Jekyll compiles a simple style change.

I hope it is much better now.

Re: WordPress Alternatives

#58

Post by Brajeshwar »

tomjen3 wrote: post #31
Brajeshwar wrote: post #23

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 anywhe…

Its solid advice if that is your problem and if you are migrating from a standard wordpress. I ran into another problem - I wanted a static site[0]. I tried some of the static hosting engines, including Jekyll, but they always seemed to want to force my site into a blog format. Yeah with some work they could partially be twisted into what I wanted, but only partially. Do you know of a static website builder that buil…

I think yours is the candidate for Pandoc[1] or something like Soupault[2]. But you will be doing the HTML/CSS writing yourself.

1. https://pandoc.org

2. https://soupault.app

Re: WordPress Alternatives

#59

Post by gloflo »

oidar wrote: post #17

If you are looking for a no-nonsense, simple blog platform consider Bear[1] - It's super simple to use, and has been solid for me for the past year. Plus the support (and dev - Herman Martinus here on HN[2]) is responsive and friendly. [1] https://bearblog.dev [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=HermanMartinus

Emphasis on platform.

> Bear Blog has been built as a platform and not as an individual blog generator. It is more like Substack than Hugo. Due to this it isn't possible to individually self-host a Bear Blog.

Re: WordPress Alternatives

#60

Post by tasuki »

tomjen3 wrote: post #31
Brajeshwar wrote: post #23

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 anywhe…

Its solid advice if that is your problem and if you are migrating from a standard wordpress. I ran into another problem - I wanted a static site[0]. I tried some of the static hosting engines, including Jekyll, but they always seemed to want to force my site into a blog format. Yeah with some work they could partially be twisted into what I wanted, but only partially. Do you know of a static website builder that buil…

Jekyll is perfectly fine even for non blog sites. I organise a yearly event (https://lsg.go.art.pl/english) and made its website with Jekyll (https://github.com/tasuki/lsg). Absolutely no blog involved.

Middleman is nice if you need something more flexible than what Jekyll can offer.

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