Best WordPress alternatives
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darkzerothree
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Really depends on your needs
Do you want a specific programming language?
Do you need one specific feature? Scheduled posts or RSS feeds, for example..
Do you want a DB or flat file?
I'm not trying to avoid the question, but there are hundreds of CMS right now.
Do you want a specific programming language?
Do you need one specific feature? Scheduled posts or RSS feeds, for example..
Do you want a DB or flat file?
I'm not trying to avoid the question, but there are hundreds of CMS right now.
Vert
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The question was with a general approach, but from my concrete case I would only need the functions of a traditional blog, as it comes to be posts, comments on them, RSS feeds, image uploader etc...
As for DB or Flat, I have no preference for either option.
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Aside from rolling your own, which I did recently using Elixir and Phoenix, I think the static site generators are the best way to go in terms of security, performance and flexibility. The amount of days/weeks/months I see some people spend trying to shoehorn WP into something it's not really meant to do is just insane. WordPress is a not so majestic monolith and nothing short of a complete overhaul will change that. No matter how much mint people spray on dog shit, it's just going to smell like mint dog shit, but that won't stop people from thinking there's a "better way to spray the mint".
Now for the alternatives. Here are two that I feel are the best-of-breed Static Site Generators:
There's Jekyll, which is implemented in Ruby. If you don't know Ruby, don't let that scare you. I honestly worry about the devs that complain about having to run a couple of commands or edit a simple config file to install software libs, as if everything in software land is supposed to "just work". The same devs normally have no prob with installing thousands of NPM packages to get the Javascript/CSS stuff right, so go figure. At any rate, Jekyll is an excellent static site generator you can use with pretty much any static HTML template you want. It has all the "blog-aware" things like permalinks, pages, etc.
If you want to take a walk on the high-performance side of things, there's Hugo, which is implemented in Go. Go reads a bit less "English-like" than Ruby, but it's not hard to pick up. When I'm talking about "high-performance" in this context, I'm talking about how long it takes to generate the site. Go clearly wins in site creation speed as Go is a compiled language with ridiculously fast compile/run time that can be close to C/C++ depending on the task. When Hugo generates an entire site, it might even seem like something is "broken" because of how fast it is. Installation of Hugo is as easy as dropping a binary in your path on linux (or just put it in /usr/local/bin). For the masochists, Hugo even works on Windows from what I've read.
While I included what language each Site Generator is implemented in and even ranted a bit, it's very possible that after installing things that you won't have to dive deep into Ruby or Go itself to get most things in the respective frameworks to do what you want.
Now for the alternatives. Here are two that I feel are the best-of-breed Static Site Generators:
There's Jekyll, which is implemented in Ruby. If you don't know Ruby, don't let that scare you. I honestly worry about the devs that complain about having to run a couple of commands or edit a simple config file to install software libs, as if everything in software land is supposed to "just work". The same devs normally have no prob with installing thousands of NPM packages to get the Javascript/CSS stuff right, so go figure. At any rate, Jekyll is an excellent static site generator you can use with pretty much any static HTML template you want. It has all the "blog-aware" things like permalinks, pages, etc.
If you want to take a walk on the high-performance side of things, there's Hugo, which is implemented in Go. Go reads a bit less "English-like" than Ruby, but it's not hard to pick up. When I'm talking about "high-performance" in this context, I'm talking about how long it takes to generate the site. Go clearly wins in site creation speed as Go is a compiled language with ridiculously fast compile/run time that can be close to C/C++ depending on the task. When Hugo generates an entire site, it might even seem like something is "broken" because of how fast it is. Installation of Hugo is as easy as dropping a binary in your path on linux (or just put it in /usr/local/bin). For the masochists, Hugo even works on Windows from what I've read.
While I included what language each Site Generator is implemented in and even ranted a bit, it's very possible that after installing things that you won't have to dive deep into Ruby or Go itself to get most things in the respective frameworks to do what you want.
darkzerothree
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This is actually a good list:
https://www.queness.com/post/14579/6-lightweight-flexible-php-cms
The fun thing is that they include WolfCMS, which I like. VERY hacky, and insanely easy to shoehorn stuff into it that would take ages and some arcane invocations in WP.
For flatfile, batflat also comes to mind.
https://batflat.org/
https://www.queness.com/post/14579/6-lightweight-flexible-php-cms
The fun thing is that they include WolfCMS, which I like. VERY hacky, and insanely easy to shoehorn stuff into it that would take ages and some arcane invocations in WP.
For flatfile, batflat also comes to mind.
https://batflat.org/
Vert
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Well, lately I've thought about creating my own little "CMS" using Ruby on Rails. The problem is that I don't have experience or programming skills (not just Ruby, but in general).
I've always been very attracted to the idea of creating a website with only the features that I need and personalized to the maximum, without features that I will not need, as is the case of WordPress.
I took a quick look and it does not look bad. As I said, I don't know Ruby, but if you say I could still do something decent, I think I'll try it.
From what I see, it's much more minimalist than Rails, but I don't know if it can end up limiting me. In principle, it seems to have what it needs at the basic level.
It certainly looks very good.
turbin3
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@Vert, I definitely recommend considering an existing CMS or generator, based on what you've said so far. At this point, with the volume of them that are currently available, building a new one for the average use case would be a matter of reinventing the wheel and unnecessary. What would work best is an existing CMS, that has a good degree of industry adoption, with a broad range of resources available to help you learn and grow with a platform.
As far as generators go, many will know I tend to lean the direction of Hugo since I'm a fiend for speed. I do feel that Jekyll is more approachable and usable for the average person that may not be a highly experienced developer. On top of that, the speed differences between the two are not a major issue until you start to get into massive volumes of content. For example, a site with several thousand posts. That might take minutes to regenerate with Jekyll, and only a few seconds with Hugo. Not really a big deal, unless you have a high positing frequency and need to update your site just as frequently. At that point, it's a measurable ROI issue.
Hugo, being that it's based in Go, does have a bit more of a complex programming language construct. For most average uses and simple modifications, this may be a non-issue. When your use case demands more customized and complex functionality, Go can be a bit more difficult to work with in some cases. On top of that, while the Hugo community is good, alive, and continuously working on evolving, Hugo has not yet reached the level of industry adoption Jekyll has.
For example, if you're a visual learner, I bet you like watching video tutorials on YouTube or various e-learning sites, so you can actually see how things are done instead of just reading about it. I prefer learning that way personally. Well with Jekyll, you'll find a massive number of resources for dev work. There's a bunch of great tutorial series on YT as well. Search around for the Dev Tips channel (Travis Nielsen, a Googler), and he has some good walkthroughs. With Hugo, you'll find very little on YT, and very little outside of the official Hugo community site, so you'll often find you are on your own for many custom coding efforts.
To recap, I'd definitely recommend giving Jekyll a serious look, as far as generators go. I would say for the average digital marketer/blogger who is mostly building blogging sites or simple business sites, and when those sites have a relatively low volume of content (dozens to maybe a few hundred posts), Jekyll will serve you just fine. When you start to get into thousands of pages/posts, that's when I might recommend benchmarking performance between Jekyll, Hugo, and whatever else to see if there's a positive ROI to be had in switching from one to another. The awesome thing with Jekyll, Hugo, and several others is that the content is stored in Markdown files. So migrating content between Jekyll and Hugo can often be done VERY quickly, sometimes only necessitating minor tweaks to the Markdown files' frontmatter.
As far as generators go, many will know I tend to lean the direction of Hugo since I'm a fiend for speed. I do feel that Jekyll is more approachable and usable for the average person that may not be a highly experienced developer. On top of that, the speed differences between the two are not a major issue until you start to get into massive volumes of content. For example, a site with several thousand posts. That might take minutes to regenerate with Jekyll, and only a few seconds with Hugo. Not really a big deal, unless you have a high positing frequency and need to update your site just as frequently. At that point, it's a measurable ROI issue.
Hugo, being that it's based in Go, does have a bit more of a complex programming language construct. For most average uses and simple modifications, this may be a non-issue. When your use case demands more customized and complex functionality, Go can be a bit more difficult to work with in some cases. On top of that, while the Hugo community is good, alive, and continuously working on evolving, Hugo has not yet reached the level of industry adoption Jekyll has.
For example, if you're a visual learner, I bet you like watching video tutorials on YouTube or various e-learning sites, so you can actually see how things are done instead of just reading about it. I prefer learning that way personally. Well with Jekyll, you'll find a massive number of resources for dev work. There's a bunch of great tutorial series on YT as well. Search around for the Dev Tips channel (Travis Nielsen, a Googler), and he has some good walkthroughs. With Hugo, you'll find very little on YT, and very little outside of the official Hugo community site, so you'll often find you are on your own for many custom coding efforts.
To recap, I'd definitely recommend giving Jekyll a serious look, as far as generators go. I would say for the average digital marketer/blogger who is mostly building blogging sites or simple business sites, and when those sites have a relatively low volume of content (dozens to maybe a few hundred posts), Jekyll will serve you just fine. When you start to get into thousands of pages/posts, that's when I might recommend benchmarking performance between Jekyll, Hugo, and whatever else to see if there's a positive ROI to be had in switching from one to another. The awesome thing with Jekyll, Hugo, and several others is that the content is stored in Markdown files. So migrating content between Jekyll and Hugo can often be done VERY quickly, sometimes only necessitating minor tweaks to the Markdown files' frontmatter.
Vert
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Any suggestion? Drupal or Joomla are the other two major CMS, but it seems they have many of the negatives of WordPress.
About generators, Jekyll looks very interesting, I'll follow him more closely.
turbin3
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Take my words with a grain but, personally, I wouldn't even bother with Joomla or Drupal. They're like Wordpress, only with more of the crap. At least that's my feeling on the matter.
The question I'd have, and I think one of the important deciding factors, is what degree of dev experience do you (or anyone asking the question) have, and what degree of setup are you comfortable with?
There are a lot of options that are much more high-level, semi-managed, that are removed from things like having to manually configure a server. There's the Ghost CMS, for example, which might be great for something highly text content-focused, but may be too minimalist for other uses.
In other cases, something like others around here seem to like, Pico CMS, could be great for filling that need. Only thing is, there's more setup involved, and work that needs to be done at the server level, which may be a bit beyond what people want to deal with. The benefit, though, is flat file CMS' like Pico are often built on a more dynamic or preprocessed language like PHP, so you still retain ability to add a lot of dynamic function to a site, making for a far more functional solution versus a purely static site.
The question I'd have, and I think one of the important deciding factors, is what degree of dev experience do you (or anyone asking the question) have, and what degree of setup are you comfortable with?
There are a lot of options that are much more high-level, semi-managed, that are removed from things like having to manually configure a server. There's the Ghost CMS, for example, which might be great for something highly text content-focused, but may be too minimalist for other uses.
In other cases, something like others around here seem to like, Pico CMS, could be great for filling that need. Only thing is, there's more setup involved, and work that needs to be done at the server level, which may be a bit beyond what people want to deal with. The benefit, though, is flat file CMS' like Pico are often built on a more dynamic or preprocessed language like PHP, so you still retain ability to add a lot of dynamic function to a site, making for a far more functional solution versus a purely static site.
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My favorite is Lektor: https://www.getlektor.com/
This is everything I'm looking for in a static site generator, you get a WordPress like backend, but you can also simply edit the site's source files in a text editor. Lektor much more flexible that Jekyll or Pelican (last I looked). There are advanced features, you can make pretty sophisticated static sites - I've used Lektor to make an image gallery site with all kinds of special pages and category features and stuff. It comes with a simple blog template to get you started, if that's all you need.
The creator, Armin Ronacher, is the same guy that created Flask and Jinja2, which gives the project a lot of extra credibility in my book.
This is everything I'm looking for in a static site generator, you get a WordPress like backend, but you can also simply edit the site's source files in a text editor. Lektor much more flexible that Jekyll or Pelican (last I looked). There are advanced features, you can make pretty sophisticated static sites - I've used Lektor to make an image gallery site with all kinds of special pages and category features and stuff. It comes with a simple blog template to get you started, if that's all you need.
The creator, Armin Ronacher, is the same guy that created Flask and Jinja2, which gives the project a lot of extra credibility in my book.
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@pfingy Second on Lektor. It was/is in my eyes the most promising/ideal static site generator when I was looking around besides Hugo and Middleman. But I was hesitant to learn the piece of tech as the community is quiet and I was still new at site dev.
Anyway, I took a look around again and saw Sculpin, a static site generator written in PHP that converts Markdown files and uses Twig. That is a super convenient path to start generating sites if you are coming from flat file CMSes like Pico, Statamic, Craft, Kirby or Grav.
If you understand what this does, you should feel right at home.
Anyway, I took a look around again and saw Sculpin, a static site generator written in PHP that converts Markdown files and uses Twig. That is a super convenient path to start generating sites if you are coming from flat file CMSes like Pico, Statamic, Craft, Kirby or Grav.
If you understand what this does, you should feel right at home.
Code:
<html>
{% if page.special_value is defined %}
Special value exists and is <strong>{{ page.special_value }}</strong>!.
{% endif %}
{% block content %}Fallback content{% endblock %}
</html>
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So here's what if tried so far:
Getkirby - Love this but have minimal php knowledge so its been difficult for me to try build a blog.
Jekyll - Easy to set up, very slow to compile.
Picocms - Just realized twig is kinda like jekyll so I'm gonna give this a try.
Getkirby - Love this but have minimal php knowledge so its been difficult for me to try build a blog.
Jekyll - Easy to set up, very slow to compile.
Picocms - Just realized twig is kinda like jekyll so I'm gonna give this a try.
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Prentzz
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I'm actually a big fan of Wordpress. It's got a bunch of issues, but it's insanely simple. I presume that most of you want to grow your businesses to the point where there is a team working below you to create content.
Most people can barely use Microsoft Word. I don't want to make it any more complicated than it needs to be. Most writers and editors know how to use WP now. It's industry standard.
Vogue.com uses it and they have hundreds of thousands of pages. I always figured that when the infrastructure becomes a problem I'll have the cashflow to hire a team to make custom changes the the CMS. Maybe that's being reactive rather than proactive, but I don't necessarily think that's always a problem.
It's also worth thinking about how you're going to liquidate. Most people will prefer a site to be on a CMS they understand. Investors aren't going to be messing around themselves, they'll want to easily be able to hire someone to manage it.
That's not to say it's always the right option, but you have better things to do. It's fine for the vast majority of people and makes the most sense in a lot of cases. Trying to change CMS is the ultimate version of "changing the website design will make me successful".
You do you, but I'm gonna be over here doing me.
Most people can barely use Microsoft Word. I don't want to make it any more complicated than it needs to be. Most writers and editors know how to use WP now. It's industry standard.
Vogue.com uses it and they have hundreds of thousands of pages. I always figured that when the infrastructure becomes a problem I'll have the cashflow to hire a team to make custom changes the the CMS. Maybe that's being reactive rather than proactive, but I don't necessarily think that's always a problem.
It's also worth thinking about how you're going to liquidate. Most people will prefer a site to be on a CMS they understand. Investors aren't going to be messing around themselves, they'll want to easily be able to hire someone to manage it.
That's not to say it's always the right option, but you have better things to do. It's fine for the vast majority of people and makes the most sense in a lot of cases. Trying to change CMS is the ultimate version of "changing the website design will make me successful".
You do you, but I'm gonna be over here doing me.
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Good point. It's why I like getkirby because the backend is kinda like Wordpress and pretty easy to use.I'm actually a big fan of Wordpress. It's got a bunch of issues, but it's insanely simple. I presume that most of you want to grow your businesses to the point where there is a team working below you to create content.
Most people can barely use Microsoft Word. I don't want to make it any more complicated than it needs to be. Most writers and editors know how to use WP now. It's industry standard.
Vogue.com uses it and they have hundreds of thousands of pages. I always figured that when the infrastructure becomes a problem I'll have the cashflow to hire a team to make custom changes the the CMS. Maybe that's being reactive rather than proactive, but I don't necessarily think that's always a problem.
It's also worth thinking about how you're going to liquidate. Most people will prefer a site to be on a CMS they understand. Investors aren't going to be messing around themselves, they'll want to easily be able to hire someone to manage it.
That's not to say it's always the right option, but you have better things to do. It's fine for the vast majority of people and makes the most sense in a lot of cases. Trying to change CMS is the ultimate version of "changing the website design will make me successful".
You do you, but I'm gonna be over here doing me.
But shall see how it goes
turbin3
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I'm actually a big fan of Wordpress. It's got a bunch of issues, but it's insanely simple. I presume that most of you want to grow your businesses to the point where there is a team working below you to create content.
Most people can barely use Microsoft Word. I don't want to make it any more complicated than it needs to be. Most writers and editors know how to use WP now. It's industry standard.
Vogue.com uses it and they have hundreds of thousands of pages. I always figured that when the infrastructure becomes a problem I'll have the cashflow to hire a team to make custom changes the the CMS. Maybe that's being reactive rather than proactive, but I don't necessarily think that's always a problem.
It's also worth thinking about how you're going to liquidate. Most people will prefer a site to be on a CMS they understand. Investors aren't going to be messing around themselves, they'll want to easily be able to hire someone to manage it.
That's not to say it's always the right option, but you have better things to do. It's fine for the vast majority of people and makes the most sense in a lot of cases. Trying to change CMS is the ultimate version of "changing the website design will make me successful".
You do you, but I'm gonna be over here doing me.
There are several important insights in what @Prentzz is talking about. A hell of a lot of time, effort, and expense can be wasted in searching for "perfect" vs. good enough. It's something to consider, and WP is certainly the convenient and often most efficient option for the average person.
With Wordpress, I think one issue that plagues a lot of people is "mission creep". In short, with WP, things tend to snowball, and when they go bad, it's often in spectacular fashion. There are of course a number of things a person can do to protect themselves, their team, and/or their company:
- Backups
- Backup the site religiously. If you're paranoid (and rightly so), backup in multiple, decentralized locations. PAY for backups. It's an investment worth your time.
- Backup the server religiously. This is where things like VPS, VPS images/snapshots, or maybe even "containerization" (Docker, for example) can come in handy. Something gets destroyed, worst case, spin up a "copy" and get back in the game!
- If the expense and resource requirements won't be a negative-ROI drain on you or your company, have a duplicate server running on the side, ready to fire up and/or redirect DNS if things start to go nuts. With hosts like Linode, it's not usually costly either to have a minimalist server with your duplicated site built on the side, and spin it up if you need to get back up quickly.
- Backup the site religiously. If you're paranoid (and rightly so), backup in multiple, decentralized locations. PAY for backups. It's an investment worth your time.
- Security
- Budget for this. Either your time, or paying a pro to asses your site/server security. This is a massive subject of its own, and I won't expand on it here as it demands its own series of threads. General idea is, accept less convenience for yourself and your people, and you'll probably be making it a hell of a lot less vulnerable to malicious attempts.
- Versioning & Staging
- If you're a developer or otherwise responsible for the technical side of a WP site, it's important to put a development and deployment structure in place, if you really want to do it right.
- This doesn't have to be difficult. There are plugins (that may take some setup on the server side) to generate staging sites, though you'll have to assess whether they'll work for your setup or not. If you don't mind the hosting cost, there are WP hosts out there, like WPEngine, that already have this built in functionality. $30-100/mth for hosting is NOTHING for any real business anyways.
- If possible, use something like Git for versioning. "Doing it live" and drag and dropping to FTP is eventually going to bite you. Might as well solve that problem up front.
Through those multiple failings of my own, things culminated coincidentally with several successful hacks in a short period of time. The vulnerability allowed full server access, locking me out of everything. Unfortunately, at the same time, I had lost several backups of data, even had a local hard drive with backup data die around that time (Seagate, NEVER AGAIN). The end result was, going from a healthy six figure business to entirely dead in the water the next day, and nothing recoverable. That's enough of a system shock to poison anyone against something, so I am of course biased. That being said, I do see and appreciate the wisdom in Prentzz's post. Whatever we may rant about or be adamant about, at the end of the day, you have to do you and make sure it's the right thing for you.