Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rtpg 695 days ago
You could probably get far with Wordpress. Why? Because if you're technical you can navigate the tricky setup well, and it's made in a way to support a lot of things for non-technical people.

Of course you gotta get it running (or pay people like WP Engine), but you're going to end up with a thing that will work.

That or dev.to is a good spot I think.

1 comments

I run a Wordpress instance on my home server. An extract job regularly exports a static version of the site. I host it on a DO droplet with a bunch of other static websites.
This is really an underrated option. WordPress is amazingly powerful, and if you don't have any interest in coding the layout and stuff yourself, there is an abundance of pre-written stuff that you can buy for cheap, and there's plenty of options that are free as well.

I definitely wouldn't use WordPress to serve the site permanently though. It is just a lot of maintenance, a huge security footprint, and overall something that you have to routinely think about.

Where The Sweet spot is, is using WordPress to manage the content and define the layout and everything, but then exporting the site into a static form which you can then host with nginx or something similar. This is really a killer setup that is underrated.

Note: do as I say, not as I do. I did this setup for one site, but I don't do it anymore and won't, mainly for probably silly reasons: I really dislike the WordPress ecosystem, and while there are phenomenal developers who are involved in WordPress and who work on it, the vast majority produce hacked together code that barely works. Everyone is trying to make a business out of it, so it's the most highly commercialized framework I've ever seen. That sort of thing really repulses me, which is why I don't use it. Technically, it is the most capable and mature solution. Fortunately, when it comes to personal projects and sites, I can be petty and impractical about what technologies I choose :-D

What's a good way to extract a static version? I currently use a plug-in that claims to create static pages, but the management is still on Wordpress. Is that good enough?

Would the static pages extracted support commenting?

Thanks.

I‘m using WP2Static, a Wordpress plugin. But you can script up something yourself with wget/curl, too.

Comments won’t work. You need a backend and database for that.

WP2Static seems nice. Thanks!