WordPress and its discontents

The Gutenberg pivot polarized the community, myself included. Despite being hamstrung by its blogging bones, the new powerful CMS promised by Gutenberg wasn’t convincing. Classic WP was relatively simple, Gutenberg massively complex (drupalization?), and the buggy beta limbo we’ve endured for years cries out — why wasn’t Gutenberg the fork??

Now comes the Elonization of Matt Mullenweg, Founder, further destabilizing WordPress’ greatest asset, its community. So it seemed a good time to get out of my turtle shell and have a look around at the state of the art.

I recently remade my personal website alvarsirlin.dev using AstroJS. I may write a dedicated post in the future about the building process. In the meantime, the lesson learned was that there are interesting alternatives to the monolithic frameworks we’ve grown accustomed to.

Astro loads the least amount of code necessary to render any particular part of the page. And it focuses on making things easy, like Mark Down content editing, file based routing, server side js rendering (unless otherwise specified) to make the load light on both the server and developer. That means we can get up and iterating fast as well as plug different components into the stack without major refactors. I can edit my website’s content directly through Markdown files in the repository. And for client work I cant wait to plug in some other of the dozens of Headless CMSes. Dark Matter seems a particularly interesting one that builds off of Astro concepts. In theory we can embed Vue, React and other components into its Islands Architecture, but I have heard there can be

Other things I’m interested in exploring are Alpine and HTMX. Both integrate with Craft CMS from Happy Cog (remember them!).

So thanks for all the fish Matt! I remain indebted.