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Ask HN: To Wordpress or not to Wordpress

by goldham on 5/3/10, 3:37 AM with 9 comments

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?

  • by jmount on 5/3/10, 4:15 AM

    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).

  • by thenbrent on 5/3/10, 6:31 AM

    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.

  • by amk on 5/4/10, 6:18 AM

    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.

  • by doron on 5/3/10, 4:12 AM

    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.

  • by pilib on 5/3/10, 6:29 AM

    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.