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Comment by seanp2k2 | Hacker News Reader

Static site generators are an infinitely better choice for making actual blogs. Wordpress has evolved into a CMS similar to Drupal or Joomla with all the available plugins. You can make it into a store or a wiki or basically anything, but you probably shouldn’t. Wordpress was really cool back in the PHP5 days, but Moveable Type and other “old school” static CMS generators always scaled better. Today with node and the dozens of good SSGs, there’s really no excuse to use WP for a blog. The content doesn’t change between page loads, so why would you server-side generate the page dynamically on each page load? The way that it works is fundamentally wrong, and while it’s not very hard to fix with Varnish or WPSuperCache...why not start with the right tool for the job?

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Try getting 5+ marketing people to learn git and GitHub sometime and let me know how it goes.

For just the blogging portion, you can just add the blog posts directly through github (the markdown files for posts).

https://help.github.com/articles/creating-new-files/

But yeah, it’s less user friendly. I’m sure someone will make a good solution for this soon.

There are some web services that will run a static site system for you like https://www.netlifycms.org/ or https://www.datocms.com/ .

Gatsby + Netlify + Netlify CMS is super.

Git is not for deployment. Also, hardcoding blog posts in the repo is a dumb solution, and not necessary for a static site. The user built markup should be separate from the code that generates static pages from it.

This has also been my experience when pleading with clients about not using Wordpress... even when they pay me to research SSGs, they seem to always revert back to WP because that's what the non-engineers know how to use.

There are still plenty of CMS options that are built around caching in a way that you effectively get the best of both worlds. I'm a big fan of Grav, which is a flat-file CMS with an optional admin panel.

The aforementioned Movable Type has a pretty graphical interface just like WP. It's just that in the background it generates static files.

It's depressing that 17 years later it still seems to lack a decent competitor.

It just works.

99% of the time for 99% of the people who want it to do something (something realistic), it does it. In order to get people to switch to something like a static site backend it has to be much better than wordpress. It can't be as good, or a little bit better it's got to be waaaay better or it's not worth the time and effort to switch away from something you're familiar with.

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