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If it's really about blogging, i.e. producing texts with images in a simple design WP is no longer an option IMHO. Go for ghost (or even gohugo.io with forestry.io). They are faster, easier to customize and have markdown but are maybe a little more difficult to set up.
If you need fancier options, prefer php and eventually need more cms like functionality or even a shop in the future choose WP.
TL;DR Minimalist publication tool = Ghost / Custom field multilingual with form and account etc.. = WP
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Ghost is a publication tool and... thats it? Its really light, focused on blogging/publishing and do it right, without clutter, and is fast🔥. Theming is really easy, just HTML + handlebar. If you are used to nodeJS / npm, its really easy to setup.
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Wordpress is cluttered, quite slow, the CMS is a mess, but you can do a lot, add plugin for anything without a lot of code, and you can expand it to whatever you like.
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My take > I wouldn't use wordpress anymore : Its not a publishing platform anymore, its a messy website framework with publishing capabilities.
If i just need a blog > ghost. If I need a website with a blog, i'd rather take another real framework to create my site and use a publishing API for the articles ( ie. ghost api or a saas like contenful)
PS: be aware of ghost current limitation before making your choice. you cannot do multilingual publishing on one instance for example or cannot create custom field for now.
Hello Offbeat, thanks for jumping in! 🙂
Speaking of theming, does Ghost have a good amount of theme to get into, especially the paid ones? I just avoid to design everything by myself for this.
Go with Ghost. You can now set it up on a $5/month DO droplet and then throw cloudflare in front of it. If you do it that way, I would say don't set it up with the one-click option and just follow the Ghost docs docs.ghost.org/v1.0.0/docs/in… . I had a couple issues before with the one-click and ended up following their setup guides and it went nice and quick and works really well.
Hi Eric, thanks for putting your thoughts here! 🙂
May I know the reason behind the usage of Cloudflare in front of Ghost?
Like what we're trying to do here. Also, if the chosen one is not Ghost, should we still use Cloudflare?
It's a free and really good CDN to help with caching. Forgot to mention that Ghost also has a great native app that makes it really nice to manage your ghost blog. It's a really well done platform and something that you can enjoy using once setup and you know your way around it.
Good points Eric! Thanks a lot, will dig deeper into it. 🙏🏻
I used Gatsby.js for my personal blog and it's a complete breeze if you're a React fan. I haven't tried hooking up to a CMS - just writing posts in markdown and pushing to Github Pages - but there's great docs on their site.
Hello Charlie! It's good that you mentioned Gatsby here. 👌🏻
I've used Gatsby prior to this, but the lack amount of theme made me pull out myself from it. Has it changed now? The thing is I don't want to spend much time designing the blog.
Hm, not sure about themes. But there are now lots of great examples on the README and docs pages. I'm sure you can find something off the shelf! My blog source code is open source - not a ton of bells or whistles, but my approach lets you write posts in either Markdown or React components.
WordPress is my choice. Ghost is really cool, but I do not have the technical skills to install it, and do not have the inclination to learn. The hosted option looks interesting and something I might try. A couple of other reasons 1. WP is great for a blog, and has excellent integrations with email marketing and payment processors 2. With managed hosting overall cost of ownership is relatively inexpensive for security, caching, backups etc 3. For a person with my limited coding skills, the learning curve is relatively low as I can usually find a plugin to do what I need it to do.