As much as using WordPress is cliche, my current job revolves around WordPress so it seemed fitting to use it personally as well. I had been using Ghost since I had been fully immersed in NodeJS, Next, React and researching any ‘new hotness’ JS frameworks or libraries that seemed to materialize out of thin air every few days.
I like Ghost and it did everything I wanted and was very easy to set up and maintain on my Raspberry Pi web server. I appreciated not having to use plugins for features that WordPress should have built into the core long ago. I really appreciated the content editor which was very fast, and had all of the content editing and layout features I wanted. The templating engine was a bit of a learning curve but once I looked at some different themes and poked around under the hood, I was able to figure out how to get the frontend to do what I wanted it to do.
Having been a PHP person for almost my entire professional career, WordPress was always looming over my shoulder. When I started to delve deep into NodeJS and other JavaScript or TypeScript-based frameworks, using Ghost for my own site seemed befitting. It was easy enough to set up and self-host on a Raspberry Pi so that’s what I did.
Alas, I find myself fully immersed in WordPress on a daily basis. I wouldn’t have considered myself a WordPress developer before but I certainly would now. In less than a year’s time, I’ve learned sooooooo much about what WordPress can do and some quirks and shortcomings about what it can’t. As much as I want to be one of the cool kids running a JavaScript-based thing for my own site, it makes more sense to use WordPress and use it as a playground of sorts to experiment and get weird if I feel like it.
Just like the answer to every car question is “Miata”, the answer to every website platform question is “WordPress”…