I have to say I'm not really a fan of wordpress either. Granted I am not a power user, in fact my knowledge of wordpress is crap, but that's partly because it's always taken me so damn long to figure out how to do anything.
Yes there are millions of plugins, and millions of themes and if you really now what you're doing it's a powerful CMS system that can look/feel how you like. But I've always found doing simple things to be fiddly (more often than not I've had to resort to hacking php), page response times are slow and adding your own themes requires expertise. Which you got to do otherwise it just looks like a theme, as polished as it might be.
What I really want to do is just write my own html from scratch. However then you gotta use some kind of webapp framework to handle page components, provide templating etc which has it's own overhead of course.
The documentation for WordPress is great (unlike many other open source projects), and the more time you spend with it the easier it becomes (like anything I guess). Theme development is drop dead easy. My best advice would be to not start with the default theme as your guide, but rather something much more stripped down. The default theme includes a lot of features simply to show them off and most aren't needed. Once you strip WP to it's core theme components building what you want back in is rewarding and really allows you to witness the power of this CMS. Most free plugins and themes are crap, but the richness of the environment means that usually someone somewhere has done or tried what you want as well. You can then use their knowledge to make your code even better (which you then maintain as opposed to relying on some student or freelancer who may or may not continue suppport)
Building your WP site, installing a free theme and a dozen plugins is definitely not the way a geek or true hacker should experience WP.
Thanks so much! I was planning to switch to Jekyll, but was confused by the apparent lack of a default template to get me started. Octopress seems to be the missing piece.
I'm in the process of moving my site to pure html/css/js. I wanted to eliminate dependencies completely and go back to a simpler time. I looked into Jekyll/Octopress but that's too much of a dependency as well. Not a framework like Wordpress, and you can easily just keep the generated pages and move on with your life, but I just want something simpler, without templates or settings files or anything like that.
Do you really need a framework/compiler for your page? I think they're a bit overused. With HTML5 tags you can create a basic template in seconds with a header, navigation, sections, asides, and articles. Then just style those tags -- without any need for classes -- in your main css file.
Part of going pure html/css/js is giving up the idea that every page on your site looks identical. You can make them look the same through a common css file, but if you decide to add/remove something from your template those changes won't carry over (I plan on versioning my css files). I think this encourages a more minimalist site, which I'm all for.
> I want to eliminate dependencies completely and go back to a simpler time
Exactly. I just want to do pure html/js/css and edit in vim or emacs. For my personal and/or blog I don't want (or need) a db to power it. Just a simple static site (i'm actually in the process of putting together a very simple static site generator that will allow you to stick components like headers, footers etc that won't require any coding for the user)
WP has many plugins but for any installation only 3-5 are truly necessary. Some plugins are needed if you run a specific type of site, e.g. a community for which the Buddypress plugin is very nice. The vast majority of plugins are there as an alternative to basic php coding and you shouldn't really use them as they degrade the performance.
Page response times really depend on your hosting but you can acheive spectacular performance gains by using W3 Total Cache. I've had sites where the load time for the home page have gone from 1200 ms to 5600 ms.
Yes, if you want your own bespoke theme you will have to code - there's simply no way around this. The trick is to start of with a sane theme template and NOT the default wordpress theme, that one is too complex and bloated.
My problem with wordpress is it has grown to become a defacto base for far too many kinds of sites. Its great as a blogging tool, provided you dont need to dig to deep on the code side (or need it to scale). I also find keeping track of the "hook" infrastructure to be far more painful than it needs to be.
Have you looked into Jekyll/GitHub Pages? It's less of a framework and more of a static site generator that uses your templates and content. It's not without some degree of overhead, but much less than trying to use a dynamic framework like Rails/Django/whatever as your blog engine.
As a security aware person, wordpress self hosting is kind of terrifying. At the very least, keep it on a dedicated VM and away from anything you care about.
As another security interested person (who does not claim to be anything remotely near an expert), my suggestion is to have a static site, generated using something like Jekyll. Most blogs don't need server-side code running, and Disqus works great for comments.
I did the same thing. Using octopress on github pages now. http://websymphony.net
Was earlier on Posterous.
If you have decent knowledge of html + css, you can have lot of flexibility in look and feel of the blog. You also get to use Compass for managing css. Code highlighting is pretty neat.
Default theme is quite readable, not like posterous low contrast themes.
And since it is hosted on github, you yourself don't have to worry about sudden surge of traffic or security stuff.
Yes, I plan on doing the same thing with my blog (zappable.com). I didn't really see the point in Posterous as a blogging platform, so I guess it makes sense they're changing focus. However, there a re a couple of issues with a self-hosted blog, such as expense, security and ability to handle traffic spikes.
If you don't want anything fancy from wordpress, then running it securely is very easy: there is an autoupdate button which will update it for you with one click, the easier will be finding a hosted solution which will update wordpress for you (sometimes it might not work if you customized it).
Tumblr is more flexible in my opinion. There's something to Posterous which makes it powerful for what tumblr was designed to do but Tumblr seems better for longer form content.
Posterous = BYOC (Bring your own Community)
Tumblr = BYOC + Utilize Tumblr's user base and promotion tools.
I setup a posterous years ago because it was the easiest way to share pics I took from my phone. It worked on my blackberry and android devices when the app markets were tiny. Now that wordpress has apps for all devices it is easy to share and post via the app if I want to put up a sunset picture and have it be tweeted out.
That's what I first thought but after looking on the Softlayer site, I think he specifically meant their cloud services, as opposed to the dedicated servers.
Why not use Amazon EC2? Their free tier (for a year) is more than sufficient for hosting a blog. After the free period is over, you only end up paying about $20/mo for a micro instance with 10GB of EBS.
Does SoftLayer offer anything more substantial than AWS?
I run a series of blogs and sites on the same instance. The micro-tier wouldn't even remotely cut it. With SoftLayer I get 4 GB of RAM and it's enough thanks to nginx and caching.
Yes there are millions of plugins, and millions of themes and if you really now what you're doing it's a powerful CMS system that can look/feel how you like. But I've always found doing simple things to be fiddly (more often than not I've had to resort to hacking php), page response times are slow and adding your own themes requires expertise. Which you got to do otherwise it just looks like a theme, as polished as it might be.
What I really want to do is just write my own html from scratch. However then you gotta use some kind of webapp framework to handle page components, provide templating etc which has it's own overhead of course.