Comment by geocrasher 9 days ago
The answer isn't headless WordPress. It's WordPress.
You're building something for a volunteer community, which means at some point you'll be gone and somebody will be wondering how the heck to manage the site with this "custom" setup that they can't figure out with chatgpt or a youtube video.
Set them up for the future, not for the now. WordPress. Just WordPress.
Reference: 26+ years in hosting, 4 years in WordPress-only hosting.
Exactly. I don't know if they've gotten better, but I worked on a headless Contentful + Gatsby site (because the previous developers got sucked into JAMstack hype) and it was a comedic catastrophe.
It required constant developer oversight, even when only publishing one or two articles a week. Things broke all the time. Builds broke constantly. Things went wrong left right and center.
Don't do it. Give them a Wordpress site.
I hate to agree because I hate WordPress, but when building something for others especially in a volunteer community it's still the go-to solution.
Pros, a ton of docs, easy non-technical customization, long term support, many already experienced users, made for basically exactly what you're doing.
Cons, it's WordPress, and the actual wp-loop is a nightmare of bad choices.
In every experience I've had, non-technical people have had a terrible time doing customizations. Not a single time have I ever seen them successfully navigate customizing pages without someone else stepping in. I see this as the worst case scenario: non-technical people can't do it and technical people also can't because they only have subpar tools to do so. I disagree wholeheartedly with this assumption.
Same. Or maybe something using PHP just as a basic templating engine (like how people used to use it). Something that can be copy/pasted to a dime a dozen cPanel powered shared webhost at a moment's notice.
In my experience, wordpress is very confusing for non-technical people to navigate. It is largely not different than a "custom" setup because it's always some patched together job of various plugins to the point that it becomes brittle and difficult to work with. I get the sense that technical people think it is more straightforward and prescribe it to people, but any non-technical person I've worked with is utterly lost in it.
I don't think the LLMs change the argument either. If anything, dealing with the complexities of wordpress could make it even more difficult without someone who knows what they're doing.
Somewhere around 15 years ago, I thought wordpress was viable, but I think we need to leave it in the dust. I worked with it again 5 years ago, and the situation was no different from what I could tell.
My wife downloads plugins for every little thing. One to hide hide the title from a page, another to display a gallery of images. Often she’ll forget and download a similar one again and they all break.
Also instead of making multiple posts, she edits the same post over and over again, adding content to it.
That’s how she was taught to use Wordpress at her old job and no amount of explaining or demonstrating will make her change her ways.
I just set Ghost up last night via the Digital Ocean droplet. The site is up, but I'm having difficulties during the sign up/subscribe process. Set up mailgun, edited the config file with credentials, but the problem persists. Hoping to get it solved this weekend when I have more time to look into it; but I definitely agree, Ghost is awesome!
Update: Got it working. Apparently Digital Ocean has some SMTP ports blocked by default. I must say, Ghost is incredible! It's built with one of my all-time favorite templating engines (handlebars) as well, so setting up custom themes would be a breeze.
Most people don't know Ghost. Almost everyone knows wordpress
This is the only correct answer.
Wordpress, give them email and password, and a .pdf with screenshots on where to click to create a new post/page or edit stuff.