Moving Away From WordPress

At the start of the year I was looking after 14 Wordpress sites - some were my own, some were for clients. I'm down to four now and with any luck they'll be gone by year end.

Drupal had been my go to CMS until (I think) about 2009, when I decided it was too complex and I needed a simpler solution. I switched to WordPress and have been a fan ever since. I've built so many things with it from simple blogs, to online shops and learning platforms, and for most of that time it was really enjoyable.

Earlier this year I found myself in a similar situation to 2009 - my CMS of choice had become far too complex and I needed something simpler. In fairness to WordPress the whole web, and web development, has got much more complex and than it used to be so I guess some of the change is about just keeping up with everyone else. But I do think that most of this complexity has come from the commercial side of WordPress and the desire to turn their platform into something that competes with drag and drop site builders like Wix.

I've tried a few different approaches this year, and there are three platforms I really like.

1. Good old fashioned HTML. Yep, there are times when hand coding something simple and static is exactly what you need.
2. Kirby, which is the flat file PHP CMS that this blog runs on. It's got a learning curve, but it's incredibly flexible.
3. Processwire, an open source database backed PHP CMS with a simple 'everything is a page' approach.

Although I've only just scratched the surface of it, I think Processwire may be my favourite. I'm going to set up a business blog and I had planned to use Kirby, but now I think I'm going to use Processwire and see how it compares to this site.

I haven't completely abandoned WordPress, but it is only going to get used for projects that require greater complexity. In my world, that's likely to be something that requires course functionality (which I'll do with the LifterLMS or LearnDash plugins) or something requiring social collaboration in which case I'll use BuddyPress.

I'd be interested to know if other people have been on a similar journey.

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