Hello community,
I am looking for a system to replace wordpress.
My goal is to build a webpage with a simple start page, an ‘about me’ and an impressum, so nothing special, but hopefully good looking.
I only use open source software, FOSS whenever possible. I have a rough understanding of some HTML, CSS, PHP, but I am happy if my future webpage doesn’t rely too heavy on my knowlege of those languages.
Wordpress feels very over the top and not many things work out of the box - you have to pay for premium products if you want a functional page, that doesn’t look exactly like twenty twenty-two. I wanted to move my wordpress site from one host to another host… Not easy, unless you pay for a plugin of course.
Now I found ModX, a CMS which looks like it is much less clunky, has more free ‘plugins’ and it looks quite intuitive with it’s folder structure.
My questions:
- Has anyone used both CMS and can compare them based on their personal experience?
- What CMS or other way do you prefer to build your simple webpage (FOSS only version)?
Edit: Thank you all for great recommendations and for sharing your experience! I learned: A full CMS is overkill for my usecase. Other, more suitable options, are:
- Flat-file CMS (Grav, Automad,…)
- static-file-generators (Hugo,…)
- Emacs-org-html-export (…)
- Build from scratch with html and css
If it’s really just three pages I would just build them with static HTML and CSS. Maybe use PHP to have common elements in a separate file, but that’s about it.
Another neat trick is to generate your website on your own PC and only publish the static version.
You can publish static files to a CDN service, which costs very little compared to traditional hosting that includes a dynamic language and database.
A CDN is also usually distributed across the world and has cool features like built-in scalability and redundancy which means very little chance of outages, can deal with traffic spikes, and fast response no matter where the visitors are from.
This is also what I suggest. I moved from WordPress to Grav. It’s good, but a lot of work to customize.
Here’s a very useful resource of code snippets to make your website attractive and functional, without aCMS. https://www.w3schools.com/howto/default.asp
I love grav. Yes its a chore intially but ive move 30+ site from wp to it and all my clients love it
CSS can become tedious, especially if you are targeting mobile device and tablets and building this in plain HTML CSS and PHP is way too much work and the end result will probably still not be very responsive and won’t look so great.
This approach is definitely an overkill and if the OP doesn’t want to use this as an educational project I will strongly suggest not to go this route. Just use some of the tools the other has suggested here, like Grav, Hugo, etc.
I have done this, but instead of PHP, I have used Server Includes, which is a performant and simple way to add repeating headers and footers etc without extra dependecies. Nginx, Apache and Caddy all supports Server Includes, but with different syntax. I have used Caddys templating language, which I am most comfortable with.
Oh man this brings back memories! It is indeed a simple way to get some basic “site template” without needing a lot of infrastructure.
It actually works great for slightly more complex stuff to, like converting markdown to HTML etc. Caddys documentation is made using Server Includes for example.