I’m still using Wordpress in many places. That said, I use it with many caveats:
- I avoid the maze of twisty plugins all alike wherever possible, using a handful of things to extend core functionality and mainly writing my own code as appropriate. Hand-coded theme, tiny
functions.php that includes lots of other modules
- Lots of domain-specific objects - not using Posts for everything but having all manner of Top-Level Objects with custom fields; essentially using it as a CMS framework.
- Very aggressive static caching all over the shop
- version control contains a deployable version of the site
- …which is deployed with automated tooling (in this case, Capistrano).
I’ve been looking at making the whole thing work using Composer and cap, but it’s not quite there yet - it’d be lovely to just store my code in a repository and yank the CMS as a dependency. I might yet try this for another project, though.
Here’s the thing: I like SSGs in principle, but end up hating them in practice. I inevitably have to learn a pile of new things, mainly because I like making nicely modelled things rather than piles of hacks. Sometimes a new language. (Don’t get me wrong, I hate PHP with a fiery passion, but it’s easy to deploy).
And: if I’m ever without my laptop, and a toolchain: making new content is hard. "Just write Markdown, compile, and rsync" is awesome until you don’t have a full checkout of your site, or an SSH tool, or a development-build machine. By contrast: XML-RPC saves my bacon from time to time when I just have a phone to hand.
Everything people say about static HTML is true, but SSGs do require one to make a different set of compromises.
Of all of them, I was most keen on Hugo, since go compiles to binaries - meaning no bloody toolchain installation, just hugo - though I really was not enjoying the docs or tinkering with it at all. So it might be time to play with Jekyll again.
