marketmonster
Junior Member
- Dec 19, 2011
- 112
- 51
I know Wordpress and IM have gone hand in hand over the years and I do agree that is finally evolving into a pretty nice GUI for a CMS from the user perspective. That said, it has plenty of downsides most notably the growing legions of bots that try to hack WP installs across the web 24 hours a day.
But the real reason I am leaving the wordpress ship is I need more control over the layout of my sites and I don't care to learn PHP, MySQL, etc. Plus I am making more small sites these days (often just 1-3 pages) so it seems like a lot of software and server-side tech for a side that is essentially just a couple of static HTML pages.
Why can't I just have a few simple text files that get wrapped in a template and stuck on the web?
Enter the world of static site generators (or SSG for short). By definition this is a toolset (or framework so to speak) for spitting out static sites that are fast and in my opinion easier to maintain, and deploy to lots of locations. You can host a static site on Amazon's S3 (for cheap, pending your traffic), or even for free on Dropbox.
One of the most popular SSG's is Jekyll, which is written in Ruby. Don't be scared though... you don't actually have to know how to write Ruby to use it. In fact one of the joys of SSG's is that you are able to transform a folder full of markdown files into a full-blown blog or just a small one-page-wonder if you'd rather.
What's markdown you say? It's an awesome way to write web content without needing a GUI (although there are free markdown GUI's on the web or for your computer). It's easy to use since it's mostly just like writing plain text. My writers and VA had no trouble picking it up.
Jekyll is popular but there is a growing collection of SSG's out there (all free and open source). My personal favorite is Hexo.
Creating themes for your sites from scratch in wordpress is not a lot of fun in my opinion, but I never did get around to learning much PHP. Working on your own theme for a SSG is much more fun though as most SSG's allow you to use plugins for pre-propressors like Sass, Less, Jade, Haml, Handlebars, Coffeescript, etc. With complete flexibility in how I structure a project I don't feel boxed in and annoyed like when trying to develop a WP theme.
None of them have any GUI so this isn't for the drag-and-drop crowd and I suppose the catch is that you have to run a few basic commands with a command-line interface (mac user's you already have Terminal installed... Windows people you probably need Putty).
Don't fear the command line though. You don't actually have to understand the commands... just copy and paste out of the docs for the generator you choose. Typically there is just three commands... make a new project, serve the project (this is for theme development or to see the site before publishing), and of course "generate".
Anyway, this is more of a general introduction to the concept of SSG's. If you are tired of all of the server and development overhead of WP then give a static site generator a try.
But the real reason I am leaving the wordpress ship is I need more control over the layout of my sites and I don't care to learn PHP, MySQL, etc. Plus I am making more small sites these days (often just 1-3 pages) so it seems like a lot of software and server-side tech for a side that is essentially just a couple of static HTML pages.
Why can't I just have a few simple text files that get wrapped in a template and stuck on the web?
Enter the world of static site generators (or SSG for short). By definition this is a toolset (or framework so to speak) for spitting out static sites that are fast and in my opinion easier to maintain, and deploy to lots of locations. You can host a static site on Amazon's S3 (for cheap, pending your traffic), or even for free on Dropbox.
One of the most popular SSG's is Jekyll, which is written in Ruby. Don't be scared though... you don't actually have to know how to write Ruby to use it. In fact one of the joys of SSG's is that you are able to transform a folder full of markdown files into a full-blown blog or just a small one-page-wonder if you'd rather.
What's markdown you say? It's an awesome way to write web content without needing a GUI (although there are free markdown GUI's on the web or for your computer). It's easy to use since it's mostly just like writing plain text. My writers and VA had no trouble picking it up.
Jekyll is popular but there is a growing collection of SSG's out there (all free and open source). My personal favorite is Hexo.
Creating themes for your sites from scratch in wordpress is not a lot of fun in my opinion, but I never did get around to learning much PHP. Working on your own theme for a SSG is much more fun though as most SSG's allow you to use plugins for pre-propressors like Sass, Less, Jade, Haml, Handlebars, Coffeescript, etc. With complete flexibility in how I structure a project I don't feel boxed in and annoyed like when trying to develop a WP theme.
None of them have any GUI so this isn't for the drag-and-drop crowd and I suppose the catch is that you have to run a few basic commands with a command-line interface (mac user's you already have Terminal installed... Windows people you probably need Putty).
Don't fear the command line though. You don't actually have to understand the commands... just copy and paste out of the docs for the generator you choose. Typically there is just three commands... make a new project, serve the project (this is for theme development or to see the site before publishing), and of course "generate".
Anyway, this is more of a general introduction to the concept of SSG's. If you are tired of all of the server and development overhead of WP then give a static site generator a try.
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