It seems like when I’m not writing posts on one of my blogs, I’m thinking about whether or not to replace WordPress as my CMS. It’s an endless quest that I have gone on several times without ever actually replacing the software.
I have used WordPress for all of my blogs since 2007 when I started my very first blog. Back then, it was a lean CMS centered around blogging and not the behemoth do-all, be-all CMS it attempts to be today. For most of my purposes, it is extremely overkill since all I really need it for is to manage my blog posts. You might argue that I should just ignore all of the features I don’t need, such as Block Themes (which I absolutely hate), but it’s not quite that easy.
I hardly use any plugins, but WordPress still loads a number of additional CSS and JS files that I don’t have anything to do with. I understand they are there to add default styling and functionality for the post blocks, but that just means I have to override anything, particularly styles, that I want to appear or function differently with my own code. The issue with that is then both the defaults and my overrides still need to be downloaded which, call me fussy, I find to be very inefficient.
My profession is web development with a strong emphasis on the frontend and I’ve become rather picky about what and how my websites load. I don’t just want, I need to have full control of it to feel like I am presenting my best work to the world. I do use custom themes on all of my blogs, but I can only control so much of what WordPress injects into my theme.
Other than bloat, I’ve just always wanted to write my own blog software from the ground up. It sounds like a fun project. I’ve kicked around several different ideas and made various attempts in the past, but so far, nothing has stuck. I can’t seem to decide on a technology stack for the long term nor on whether I want to essentially build another, custom CMS with a web-based backend or whether having my blog posts as Markdown files in the file system is enough. I’ve even gone as far as to write a script to export WordPress posts to Markdown files so that I have all of my posts ready to go in the event that I decide for the latter.
That’s been my real archilles heel: I can’t make a final decision as to how I want my blog to be. I just keep turning in circles. Do I want to use Node? How about PHP? Oh, maybe I’ll give Swift a go. At least some of these various attempts have given me content to write about for the blog though.
Of course, despite containing a lot of features I don’t need, WordPress also offers a lot I would have to rebuild: a search, categories and tags, RSS feeds (for the whole site, as well as category-specific), related posts, etc. Not to mention that writing plugins for it is incredibly simple and I even use a few custom plugins I’ve written for myself (such as for the stories section of Haunting Alex or the World Map page on History Rhymes).
So there I go again, turning in circles: WordPress or not? At the very least, this post came out of it, so that’s something anyway.
You could try ClassicPress.
https://www.classicpress.net/
That is definitely interesting! Thanks for pointing it out, I hadn’t heard of it before.