Wordpress is better because it's easy to setup these days, can be fast if you enable caching, and has a comment system, which is a big deal if you want people to interact with your content. Other things like contact forms can easily be added. The CMS is also amazing.
With SSGs, you have a few options for comments, like Disqus, but the ad-free version costs money, it's slower because it needs to load JS, and your comments are owned by a third party company. Contacts forms can be built by integrating an external API. And anything else that requires storing data will require an integration with a third party service of some sort.
SSGs are a great concept but they're mostly for nerds who get boners by seeing over-engineered systems. They're also great for companies like Cloudflare because they can sell you services that come for free with Wordpress (CMS, image uploads, databases, workers, etc). For serious blogging, I'd opt for Wordpress.
I recently retired my Wordpress blog and replaced it with a static-site generator. My requirements were straight-forward and I ended up having Codex build it for me.
It was the last thing using MySQL, PHP, and Wordpress on my site. 3 big things to not have to keep up-to-date and secured. I can check in markdown to my repo, it builds the site, and Nginx serves it. So fast, and secure.
interesting, we went from classic CMS to Jekyll, then Hugo, then Astro and finally built our own CMS - for larger sets of content and sites. Fiddling with custom DSLs, templates, weird builds and tricks ... was just way too time consuming - unthinkable my wife would ever touch it or write an article in there :)
I have a legacy WP blog that I wanted to migrate to some static architecture for ages but IMHO users should be able to comment and maybe even post a pingback. I know, old MT days. But social media is always about getting (positive) comments and feedback, not just dropping statements and knowledge.
I also don't want to tie my site to disqus or other 3rd party cloud services and their implication on GDPR.
A buddy found Cusdis - a self-hostable Disqus alternative: https://cusdis.com . But this only does comments, no pingbacks - and via a separate product that you need to integrate using JavaScript.
And running this opens you up to security issues you were trying to avoid by going the SSG route. In a way you could just keep WP, then.
(Also, WP has this beautiful ActivityPub plugin that makes your blog a fediverse account that people can subscribe to and even comment on your posts from Mastodon/Pleroma/etc.)
I feel this article is more about all the tools they built with AI than about moving to Jekyll. None of these tools required the move in first place, since they could have literally just dumped the DB.
I’m using Jekyll for includes and so I can use Ruby to render pages from yaml data. I’m sure Pandoc can do this too one way or another but it’s dead simple out of the box in Jekyll.
With SSGs, you have a few options for comments, like Disqus, but the ad-free version costs money, it's slower because it needs to load JS, and your comments are owned by a third party company. Contacts forms can be built by integrating an external API. And anything else that requires storing data will require an integration with a third party service of some sort.
SSGs are a great concept but they're mostly for nerds who get boners by seeing over-engineered systems. They're also great for companies like Cloudflare because they can sell you services that come for free with Wordpress (CMS, image uploads, databases, workers, etc). For serious blogging, I'd opt for Wordpress.
It was the last thing using MySQL, PHP, and Wordpress on my site. 3 big things to not have to keep up-to-date and secured. I can check in markdown to my repo, it builds the site, and Nginx serves it. So fast, and secure.
Have a look at https://service.polymech.info/user/cgo/pages/poolypress-cms, agentic CMS, translates, creates and manages articles with a few prompts, widget aware.
I won’t argue with their reasons to move (which don’t stack up for me either but agree to disagree).
I also don't want to tie my site to disqus or other 3rd party cloud services and their implication on GDPR.
And running this opens you up to security issues you were trying to avoid by going the SSG route. In a way you could just keep WP, then.
(Also, WP has this beautiful ActivityPub plugin that makes your blog a fediverse account that people can subscribe to and even comment on your posts from Mastodon/Pleroma/etc.)
I mean, it’s tempting though.