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ASk HN: I Need a Self-hosted blog platform

4 points by BeccaCory ↗ HN
I'm a marketer, and looking for a blog platform where we can host the blog ourselves - ie, I want to implement extreme customization. Anyone have any recommendations.

Wordpress is not capable enough.

14 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 45.6 ms ] thread
ColinWright
What are you capable of? What skills do you have in house? If you need extreme customization, what can you do? With the right skills you could just write your own.
digisocialnet
Maybe the poster means wordpress.com is not capabale enough? To me, Wordpress is a self-hosted platform and overly capable as a blog. It's also pretty capable for any other CMS-based site.
BeccaCory
Wordpress is a fully capable blog, but we're trying to brand the way it looks, implement some discovery widgets that lead back to our actual site, and also add some features.

Basically, we want to be able to edit the HTML and potentially more, but Wordpress.com doesn't let you do this.

ohashi
WordPress.org does.
digisocialnet
Wordpress.com is a hosted implementation of Wordpress, which is available at wordpress.org. It sounds like you should research the available blog platforms out there. You can google search "top blog platforms 2014" or something similar to get an idea of what's possible.

The upside of Wordpress is that there are thousands of themes and plugins that come close to what you want. The downside of Wordpress (especially on this website) is that many developers and designers are tired of it. The code is bloated but will probably be your best bet to use because of the large community surrounding it. You can edit anything in the self-installed version, but you can also break it which is why wordpress.com doesn't let you edit the HTML.

Do a google search of "Best _____ Premium Wordpress theme" or "best ____ wordpress plugin" with whatever your ideas are and see what comes up.

NameNickHN
I'm not using Wordpress myself because I use my own blog/news script, but I customized Wordpress for some clients and the theme and plugin API lets you completely change the way a Wordpress blog looks. Wordpress has a couple of downsides but lack of customizability isn't one of them.
lauradhamilton
I have a wordpress blog for my startup. If you download the wordpress source code from wordpress.org and install it on your server (say on Amazon EC2) then you absolutely can customize the HTML, look/feel, etc and add widgets / features.

You will probably need to involve a wordpress theme developer to help you edit the HTML and get it the way you want it.

zachlatta
People seem to be pretty excited about https://ghost.org/ these days. It's open source and looks to have a pretty strong community.
bmelton
What deficiencies does Wordpress have? How is it not capable enough? Knowing whether it won't perform well under the kind of load your audience generates leads to an entirely different answer than knowing that it is limited in some other way.

If Wordpress is lacking in extensibility, then my guess is you'd be better off with something like Django, which isn't a blog at all, but could easily be converted into one -- or you could start with an existing, minimalist Django blog package and extend it.

If Wordpress is simply lacking features you need though, that's a different conversation, as it's the most likely to get those feature in the future, and/or possibly the cheapest to have those extensions developed.

michaelchum
A lot of hackers use Octopress http://octopress.org/ it is a framework over Jekyll which lets you write posts in an easy way like Wordpress. It also contains templates so you don't have to take care of the HTML/CSS/JS like in Jekyll
robotys
If wordpress is not capable enough for you it is either 1) what you are trying to do is not within scope of normal web interaction or 2) you have very limited experience using wordpress.

you need to consult a web developer that you trust for these issue.