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Ask HN: Is it insane to start a Wordpress-based blog in 2019?
I'm planning to start a blog/site where multiple people can post their stories. My initial thought was Wordpress but that includes hosting charge. On the other hand, If I pick Hugo + Netlify, I am not sure if multiple people can post in it (due to their technical limitation of writing markdown)
Any feedback?
- dvtrn 7y agoNetlify has a CMS front end that supports Hugo so contributors don't necessarily need to know how to write in Markdown, just FYI: https://www.netlifycms.org/ https://www.netlifycms.org/ But for your use case of multiple contributors, and to answer your question directly; no I wouldn't say WP is an insane choice-if you're most familiar with it and don't mind the administration, go for it.
- smacktoward 7y agoI wouldn't call it insane at all. WordPress isn't sexy, but it works really well for exactly the use case you're describing. With WP, you can give contributors a friendly graphical interface to write with and they're off to the races. With a static site generator, you have to first teach them some technical stuff that most writers won't know coming in (Markdown, Git, etc.). That's not impossible to do, but it adds friction and discourages contributions. I guarantee you no writer who doesn't know Git will appreciate you forcing them to learn it. Yes, you need hosting to run WordPress, but WordPress hosting is widely available for dirt cheap, including from the WP team themselves at https://wordpress.com https://wordpress.com. And WordPress expertise is also widely available and relatively cheap, so if your project turns out to be a big success and you need help scaling it up, that help is not hard to find. There are certainly categories of site that WordPress isn't a good fit for -- you wouldn't want to build an SPA on top of it, I mean -- but for the specific case of publishing a multi-user blog, it is very nearly a perfect fit.
- cheeky78 7y agoWordpress has its issues but you can find plugins for almost anything you need.