WordPress… Ah!

I have been using WordPress for years at this point. I deployed my first production WordPress site way back in 2010 (nearly 14 years ago), and yes that site is still alive and running – it’s my company’s website.

Lately I have been playing with a static site generators, Hugo, because I can keep the entire site under version control (git) and it loads faster. I’ve been using Hugo over on my Home Lab mini site. (Imagine that, a site is much faster when it doesn’t need a database and server side processing before sending it to the client /s). I have been trying to document and blog more things lately, but I find myself fighting with WordPress more and more. The Block Editor is neat and has added interesting features to the WordPress ‘platform’. But I find myself even fighting with the ‘blocks’ in the Block Editor. Either the blocks do not have the features one would expect or the settings for the blocks are not intuitive.

Recently while trying to make a page on my company site, I ran into an issue. I wanted to dump some custom HTML into a page for a custom art direction for the page. However, I started to fight with WP injecting random P Tags in my HTML. I’ve known of this feature for years, but I have been able to over come the issue in the past. But this time around no matter how much I tried I couldn’t get the classic editor to render the code correctly. I obviously know I can disable the Auto P feature, but it disables it site wide, which breaks the content on other pages of the site. This is a problem, I either have to go update multiple pages and posts or develop a new work around for the issue.

This is under the light of a site redesign that will “happen soon™”, so I don’t really want to do a lot of work, when I have to do a lot of work for the redesign.

WordPress is a great platform and easy to use, but every year I get closer to nuking my own WordPress Based Sites in favor of plain HTML sites. But the convenience of the back of house (WP Admin) is so nice. Along with the double edge of the WordPress Plugin Repository – even though I try not to use that many plugins. I have been thinking about dropping WordPress for a few years (since the ‘before times’), but the laziness and convenience of WordPress flow is so nice.

I have not decided that I’m going to move away from WordPress at this time.

There is a possibility that I may change this (my personal) site over to a static site, mostly because this site doesn’t need the dynamic features of WordPress or really any CMS. I will most likely re-visit this in the future…

If you have thoughts, share them with me in the comments or on Twitter.