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Comment by retube | Hacker News Reader

I have to say I'm not really a fan of wordpress either. Granted I am not a power user, in fact my knowledge of wordpress is crap, but that's partly because it's always taken me so damn long to figure out how to do anything.

Yes there are millions of plugins, and millions of themes and if you really now what you're doing it's a powerful CMS system that can look/feel how you like. But I've always found doing simple things to be fiddly (more often than not I've had to resort to hacking php), page response times are slow and adding your own themes requires expertise. Which you got to do otherwise it just looks like a theme, as polished as it might be.

What I really want to do is just write my own html from scratch. However then you gotta use some kind of webapp framework to handle page components, provide templating etc which has it's own overhead of course.

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The documentation for WordPress is great (unlike many other open source projects), and the more time you spend with it the easier it becomes (like anything I guess). Theme development is drop dead easy. My best advice would be to not start with the default theme as your guide, but rather something much more stripped down. The default theme includes a lot of features simply to show them off and most aren't needed. Once you strip WP to it's core theme components building what you want back in is rewarding and really allows you to witness the power of this CMS. Most free plugins and themes are crap, but the richness of the environment means that usually someone somewhere has done or tried what you want as well. You can then use their knowledge to make your code even better (which you then maintain as opposed to relying on some student or freelancer who may or may not continue suppport)

Building your WP site, installing a free theme and a dozen plugins is definitely not the way a geek or true hacker should experience WP.

In that case, you may look into Octopress (mentioned in the post): http://octopress.org/

Cool, thanks for the tip, I'll check it out.

Thanks so much! I was planning to switch to Jekyll, but was confused by the apparent lack of a default template to get me started. Octopress seems to be the missing piece.

I'm in the process of moving my site to pure html/css/js. I wanted to eliminate dependencies completely and go back to a simpler time. I looked into Jekyll/Octopress but that's too much of a dependency as well. Not a framework like Wordpress, and you can easily just keep the generated pages and move on with your life, but I just want something simpler, without templates or settings files or anything like that.

Do you really need a framework/compiler for your page? I think they're a bit overused. With HTML5 tags you can create a basic template in seconds with a header, navigation, sections, asides, and articles. Then just style those tags -- without any need for classes -- in your main css file.

Part of going pure html/css/js is giving up the idea that every page on your site looks identical. You can make them look the same through a common css file, but if you decide to add/remove something from your template those changes won't carry over (I plan on versioning my css files). I think this encourages a more minimalist site, which I'm all for.

> I want to eliminate dependencies completely and go back to a simpler time

Exactly. I just want to do pure html/js/css and edit in vim or emacs. For my personal and/or blog I don't want (or need) a db to power it. Just a simple static site (i'm actually in the process of putting together a very simple static site generator that will allow you to stick components like headers, footers etc that won't require any coding for the user)

WP has many plugins but for any installation only 3-5 are truly necessary. Some plugins are needed if you run a specific type of site, e.g. a community for which the Buddypress plugin is very nice. The vast majority of plugins are there as an alternative to basic php coding and you shouldn't really use them as they degrade the performance.

Page response times really depend on your hosting but you can acheive spectacular performance gains by using W3 Total Cache. I've had sites where the load time for the home page have gone from 1200 ms to 5600 ms.

Yes, if you want your own bespoke theme you will have to code - there's simply no way around this. The trick is to start of with a sane theme template and NOT the default wordpress theme, that one is too complex and bloated.

My problem with wordpress is it has grown to become a defacto base for far too many kinds of sites. Its great as a blogging tool, provided you dont need to dig to deep on the code side (or need it to scale). I also find keeping track of the "hook" infrastructure to be far more painful than it needs to be.

Have you looked into Jekyll/GitHub Pages? It's less of a framework and more of a static site generator that uses your templates and content. It's not without some degree of overhead, but much less than trying to use a dynamic framework like Rails/Django/whatever as your blog engine.

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