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Wordpress alternative for personal blog/porfolio/general website ?
Hi, all!
I'm migrating some sites to new servers this evening and I'm looking to stray away from WordPress to something possibly flat file or generally more elegant. I find WordPress to be rather heavy for my personal blog/portfolio.
I would love some insight as to what you guys feel like is hot at the current moment.
I've looked at and am considering Ghost, Grav, Pico, and Kirby
Comments
Bludit
Any particular reason for the recommendation?
Went through the same phase like you of trying out different flat file CMS's and settled for this. Simple, Elegant and open source. Supports HTML, Markdown and GitHub Flavored Markdown. Try the demo.
I switched to Pelican https://blog.getpelican.com/. Quite a nice project with a minimal learning curve.
https://www.staticgen.com/
I've played with Kirby and like it.
Ghost just seems still immature to me...I'm doing more with NodeJS and had a thought to setup ghost. What I found was that 50% of the templates on the Ghost Marketplace were 404'd or github projects that hadn't been updated in a long time. A lot of the reviews I've read have been "I like it, but sticking with WP until it matures".
If you like static site generators, some other good ones are Jekyll (which is ruby-based), Pelican (python-based), and Hugo (golang-based). You really don't need to know the language involved unless you want to extend it. I've never learned ruby and had no problems using Jekyll for instance.
Good luck.
Anchor is beautiful!
Ghost is immature but Kirby isn't?
I really dig TextPattern. It's themeable all the way down to the way it displays the date (if you want it to), and is still amazingly light on resources for a PHP dynamic blog. There are tons and themes over at TextPattern.org.
Don't let the old dates of the plugins and themes sway you- most of them are fully compatible with the latest release.
I tried Ghost but found a clean install used about 70-80 MB of RAM, whereas a clean install with WordPress was less than 30 MB. If you keep the number of plugins, etc. low WordPress is not that bad.
As some have said, Ghost seems like it still needs a bit of work. I really liked it, but didn't feel what it offerred was worth the extra resources it needed. I could see myself switching to it in the future if it continues to get better though.
At the moment I use Pelican. I like it and it gives me an excuse to learn Python so I can extend it. Plus it's tough to beat the speed of a static site.
Try: Script to install Ghost blog with Nginx and ModSecurity or Naxsi (supports multiple blogs)
https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ghost-blog
Honestly, that is my impression.
Kirby is feature-complete for what it offers...a file-based CMS. And it's written by what, one guy in his basement? For what Kirby is, it is good (though I have not been a heavy user).
On the other hand, Ghost is the future of blogs, a wordpress killer, raised tons of money, etc. I think it has a way to go to get to that point. I'm just judging them based on their stated aims.
I'm not anti-Ghost by any means...if it has what someone wants, awesome, enjoy. I think they have a lot more headwind than Wordpress for technical reasons but would be glad to see them succeed.
It's really no surprise that a platform that's been out for a decade has more stuff than the new kid on the block.
Lost in this discussion is what the OP needs the CMS to actually do, and what their technical skill level is. I ditched Drupal a while ago and set up my blog so that it works with nothing on the server side other than stock Apache (or any similar server that supports directory templates).
For a mostly static blog / portfolio, take a look at Jekyll on Github Pages -- static hosting, CDN (Fastly), SSL (*.github.io). If you need comments, just use Disqus or similar.
Lots of themes: http://jekyllthemes.org/
Gandi blogs use Dotclear, which is apparently popular in French speaking countries and has similar features to wordpress (well I've never used either, but from a distance...).
https://dotclear.org/
If it were me I'd just use a low tech static generator.
I really liked Postleaf for it's simplicity. It's been shut down and forked into a new project:
https://leafpub.org
It's the simplicity of Ghost in PHP form, IMO.
I like Grav https://getgrav.org/ (free)
and Kirby https://getkirby.com/ (commercial)
I use them both and they do a good job for my purpose (personal sites).
I like getsimple (no db), it's very easy and quick to adapt html/css themes to use with it.
Yeah this is actually really cool. Trying it out now. I'm already a fan. Very well designed, simple, good selection of plugins and themes, and markdown supported.