Author: Karen

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^^^ Me finally deciding on a CMS for this site

For those who follow me on Mastodon, you may have seen this thread I posted on Wednesday morning regarding the checkbox on the wp.org login page.

For those who don’t, here’s the text:

What. In. The. Actual. Fuck.

(Also, the “prove your humanity” below that is pretty goddamn hilarious considering all this.)

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I’ve been vacillating back and forth about moving my site from WP to another CMS or static site.

There’s many reasons, the biggest of which is time. With work, school, and other plans, it’s hard finding the time to familiarize myself with things, set up a site and import, design it how I like, etc.

So I say, “well, I’m okay since I’m self hosted. I’m showing my support to the core team. I’ll wait until a good fork happens to pop up.”

With this? Not anymore.

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One of the biggest fears that I’ve had watching all this bullshit from Matt Mullenweg is that it’s GOING to affect the self-hosted people at some point. If he could cut off access to support and updates for WPEngine, what could stop him from doing so for other self-hosted sites?

He’s definitely keeping an eye out for his name in socials and news…so who else is he gonna block in his quest to go full Muskian? (Waiting for the MAGA hat to make an appearance soon, ngl.)

Nope. I’m done.

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I poked around on #Publii this weekend and I like it. It seems simple and straightforward enough to get set up, and I finally bit the bullet and got a VPS so I can host multiple sites on one thing.

#wordpress, it was a good run. I’ll keep my eyes open for those people who will be spreading the open source forks and will support them 100%. But I ain’t about MM’s crap.

Since last weekend, I’ve been going back and forth between a lot of different CMS systems to see what I could easily migrate my site to. I tested so many things – Grav, Publii, ClassicPress. I also attempted to see if I could build a new static site using Eleventy, or Hugo, or Hexo.

As cool as all these things were, I ended up sticking with the simplest option – ClassicPress.

I wasn’t so keen on it when I tried to convert last Sunday, but after some additional research, I think this is the easiest thing for me to use at this point. As I stated in the last post, as much as I’d love to dig into a static site generator and go super simple, I just don’t have the time. Hell, I have spent wayyyyyy too much time this week with all this. And as fun as it is, I have two classes to finish for school!

So ClassicPress it is.

I know I made a few toots over the week about how ClassicPress just wasn’t QUITE it for me, but after some consideration and poking around their community forums, I changed my mind. Yes, it’s a small community and there’s not a lot there. BUT – so many people there come across as very helpful and excited to work on the project, and they seem to welcome newcomers and beginners. That’s a good sign to me. Plus, with the whole #WPDrama going down, I have a feeling a lot of people will be making their way over and helping contribute in any way they can. Hell, even I am interested in seeing how I can get into development and helping out, which I was always very scared to do with WordPress.

So hello ClassicPress and goodbye WordPress.

Hopefully Matt Mullenweg can get his head out of his ass and see how his recent foray into megalomania is affecting WordPress and their Open Source community. We don’t need another Musk, we really don’t. Hell, we don’t need Musk, either.

This whole WordPress v. WP Engine nonsense is driving me up the goddamn wall. I don’t like seeing it. I don’t like reading about it. I’ve been using WP for going on – oh, I don’t know – almost 20 years or so? I liked it because it was open source and built by people who cared about it, and it was a little more robust then Graymatter, which was the blogging system I was using at the time. (Except for LiveJournal, but LJ was essentially my Facebook/Twitter in the early aughts.)

Now I wanna ditch it. I even redid this site just this past weekend and seeing all the bullshit that Matt is pulling has my gut in a knot and wanting to see if I can find a nice, simple blogging platform/CMS that is easy to get started with, and has options for customization and self-hosting. I tried ClassicPress this weekend but the themes leave something to be desired.

I know someone is going to tell me “oh just build it yourself in Hugo/Jekyll/Eleventy” which is great, and something I eventually want to do, but the learning curve is steep and I ain’t up to doing all that.

I should take a peek at micro.blog or maybe Bear, a lot of Indieweb and Masto people are saying they like those services but I really want to keep my own site and not post on someone else’s platform. But maybe that’s what I should do right now. (It could also save me money on hosting fees.)

Ghost is an option – and one I can easily install on my managed hosting plan that I have for this – but ehhhhhhhhh with school and everything, do I really have the time to build something from scratch? No. The answer to that is no.

All I know is that I don’t like the shit Matt is pulling. I don’t like the things I’m reading about him and how he does things. But is it really worth completely upending my site over?

Maybe it really IS time to move on.

Finally found a good updated look for the site.  It took a few days to get things situated how I wanted them – and I even switched to ClassicPress to see if that would make things better – but I finally found a good theme I liked and figured out how to tweak it how I wanted.

Yesterday afternoon I had friends over for a potluck hangout – lots of good food, watching lots of fun K-pop videos on YouTube, and just having a great time with them.  They surprised me with a Chantilly cake to celebrate my passing the Core 1 A+ exam.  It was really sweet and a total shock.

I’ll be getting back on the study horse this week to work on my Core 2 studies and knock out that exam – I still have two classes for this term and need to finish them before the end of December.  It’s going to be a crazy month, that’s for sure.

All in all, it’s been a really good weekend.  I don’t get those often, so it was really nice.