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I really hope personal blogging becomes popular again!. Speaking of which, I still haven't found a really good alternative to the "horrible" WordPress for blogg

I really hope personal blogging becomes popular again!. Speaking of which, I still haven't found a really good alternative to the "horrible" WordPress for blogging. It has: - Integrated API, RSS - Tons of plugins - Accessibility, translations - Easy and powerful editor(Gutenberg) - Comments sections and forms w/ complete ownership and moderation - Easy data imports from multiple platforms. - Users and roles - 100% open source w/ GPL. You own your data - Extremely easy and cheap to host and move around. I love modern tooling and git based workflows for all my project but my "static" 11ty/Gatsby.js blog doesn't provide all these features out of the box. Instead of writing, you end up reimplementing basic cms features.

movedx 6y ago
Have you considered something like Ghost? ghost.org
- yagodragon 6y ago
  Ghost looks great and very polished! For me though, it provides much less out of the box (no built-in comments etc). It's also harder to self host and manage and the hosted service costs 30$/month which is extremely pricey for an indie blog. 3rd party ecosystem for wordpress (plugins/themes) is huge. I can easily extend my blog to an e-commerce store, an online community etc.
  - input_sh 6y ago
    > It's also harder to self host and manage Eh, I disagree. The only difference is that it uses Node instead of PHP. You still hook it up to MySQL/MariaDB/SQLite and you're good to go. Plus I consider its Members feature (https://ghost.org/members/ https://ghost.org/members/) to be a game-changer, though it's powered by Stripe, so you'll have to be in one of 39 countries supported by it to make it work without extensively hacking your theme.
    - yagodragon 6y ago
      That's a big difference. I can't use a cheap shared hosting and managing a VPS (os updates, database backups etc) is too much for a small blog. Node.js is fine but it turns out after all these years, php is still the king in crud,blog,cms type of application, which is the 99% of the websites out there. As for the members feature, wordpress has tons of "membership" plugins. Still though, Ghost landing page for members[0] does a great job explaining why i need this. Excellent design and copywriting [0] https://ghost.org/members/ https://ghost.org/members/
      - johnonolan 6y ago
        Hey! John from Ghost here :) here's a direct comparison of setting up self-hosted WP vs Ghost, just as a point of reference: https://youtu.be/rMKNgV1gTHg https://youtu.be/rMKNgV1gTHg
aaronax 6y ago
Drupal is what I use. In addition to the blog part, have enjoyed creating custom content types to track some interesting things in my life (cars, phones, and computers for example). Then I add a view to show them all in a table with the columns and sorting that I want for that particular content type. In the past I have used the APIs to a very small extent. I stored license keys for an app as a content type so that they were easy to manage by employees, and the app connected to a service that called the API. Probably any fleshed out CMS will check all but the last one of your boxes (nothing is going to be "extremely" easy to host).
zafiro17 6y ago
Have a look at serendipity. Certainly doesn't have "tons" of plugins but it's had all the ones I need, and it's dead simple: PHP and either a Mysql or a postgresql database underneath. I've used it for years, happily.
PZ81JUXJE7uJ 6y ago
That sounds exactly like October CMS.
robertoandred 6y ago
What? Gatsby plugs directly in to WordPress. That's the whole point.

movedx 6y ago

Have you considered something like Ghost? ghost.org

yagodragon 6y ago
Ghost looks great and very polished! For me though, it provides much less out of the box (no built-in comments etc). It's also harder to self host and manage and the hosted service costs 30$/month which is extremely pricey for an indie blog. 3rd party ecosystem for wordpress (plugins/themes) is huge. I can easily extend my blog to an e-commerce store, an online community etc.
- input_sh 6y ago
  > It's also harder to self host and manage Eh, I disagree. The only difference is that it uses Node instead of PHP. You still hook it up to MySQL/MariaDB/SQLite and you're good to go. Plus I consider its Members feature (https://ghost.org/members/ https://ghost.org/members/) to be a game-changer, though it's powered by Stripe, so you'll have to be in one of 39 countries supported by it to make it work without extensively hacking your theme.
  - yagodragon 6y ago
    That's a big difference. I can't use a cheap shared hosting and managing a VPS (os updates, database backups etc) is too much for a small blog. Node.js is fine but it turns out after all these years, php is still the king in crud,blog,cms type of application, which is the 99% of the websites out there. As for the members feature, wordpress has tons of "membership" plugins. Still though, Ghost landing page for members[0] does a great job explaining why i need this. Excellent design and copywriting [0] https://ghost.org/members/ https://ghost.org/members/
    - johnonolan 6y ago
      Hey! John from Ghost here :) here's a direct comparison of setting up self-hosted WP vs Ghost, just as a point of reference: https://youtu.be/rMKNgV1gTHg https://youtu.be/rMKNgV1gTHg

aaronax 6y ago

Drupal is what I use. In addition to the blog part, have enjoyed creating custom content types to track some interesting things in my life (cars, phones, and computers for example). Then I add a view to show them all in a table with the columns and sorting that I want for that particular content type. In the past I have used the APIs to a very small extent. I stored license keys for an app as a content type so that they were easy to manage by employees, and the app connected to a service that called the API. Probably any fleshed out CMS will check all but the last one of your boxes (nothing is going to be "extremely" easy to host).

zafiro17 6y ago

Have a look at serendipity. Certainly doesn't have "tons" of plugins but it's had all the ones I need, and it's dead simple: PHP and either a Mysql or a postgresql database underneath. I've used it for years, happily.

PZ81JUXJE7uJ 6y ago

That sounds exactly like October CMS.

robertoandred 6y ago

What? Gatsby plugs directly in to WordPress. That's the whole point.