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Ask HN: To Wordpress or not to Wordpress

5 points by goldham ↗ HN
As a developer. Building a site (non-blog) for yourself that only you will be updating. Would you use Wordpress, or would you not worry about a CMS? Not having to build in SEO is a great feature but, wp also has a lot of options that I would never use and I feel that I would spend a lot of time trimming off all the extras.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

9 comments

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doron
Wordepress has a vibrant community, great features, and a fairly elegant backend. It's a great way to go about building a website without having to futz around too much, if the content of your site is what you want to focus on rather then the manipulation of code, its almost a no brainer.
jmount
Use Wordpress or some other CMS. There are so many plusses: RSS feed, Web presentation, comment RSS feed, pinging of news aggregators, automatic generation of per-category and per-tag pages, date-sorted history pages, plugins (related posts, recent posts, popular posts), statistics, comments, different user roles (and capabilities), and control panels (to name a few).
dave1619
Agree. Wordpress or other cms software make it easy to fend off spam and to use their templates for quick sites.
thenbrent
Agree and you may not realise that you actually do need these features until you don't have them.
pilib
I would go with WP or a similar CMS and then modify when needed.

As another commenter said, if content is your primary concern, go with an existing solution.

thenbrent
I often ask myself when building sites: "Wouldn't this be easier with static HTML pages?". The answer is only ever yes if those static pages are all the site will ever be, which is rarely the case.

Your site will probably grow in size and scope. Don't underestimate the value of all the plugins & themes available to help save time long term.

Have you looked at WordPress yet? Many of those "features you'll never use" aren't actually in the core. You get them as needed with a plugin. That said, the 3.0 core does include a lot more.

Don't worry too much on what you decide, WP is standards compliant, so it's not too difficult to switch your css, html & content into or out of WordPress if you change your mind.

goldham
I've worked with wp before, not a whole lot though. Just installed 3.0 beta. My approach for sites that I don't expect much traffic/updates, has been to just code a database and CMS. Adding in features if/when the site matures. My underlying motivation for this question is that I find myself searching and reading 2/3 of the time instead of coding. I guess it's just part of the job that I have never experienced before. Quality over quantity.

-Graysen

thenbrent
"I find myself searching and reading 2/3 of the time instead of coding"

That's a fair statement. I do spend a lot of time searching and reading WP documentation. I feel overal I'm still saving a huge amount of time and gettng a much more robust system.

amk
I would go with Wordpress despite the fact that I am a web developer. For websites which mainly consist of content, it doesn't make sense to develop something off the ground. And static HTML is a bad idea as its hard to maintain and change unless there is one person dedicated to the task. CMS's like Wordpress also makes it easier to be consistent in your design using themes and templates. In any case, whenever I use Wordpress, I dig into the templates and modify the HTML/CSS to my needs.