However, I don't agree with the apparently widespread conclusion that it follows, from this sentiment, that not publishing is better than publishing using a less-than-lovely platform. I also don't agree with the widespread corollary, "build your own blog", when as a result you get less features than the irksome WP would give you (a common omission is support for comments - I got some amazing comments over the years, if you think it's not worth having this feature, I think I see where you're coming from, and I think you should reconsider.)
I treat blogging software as I treat any other - I dislike most programs that I run, but I often still choose to run them because the result is worth it. I can't see how "it's not worth" to run PHP+DB in order to be able to publish your thoughts. This is not to say that, given today's alternatives, WP or similar should be chosen over those alternatives, just that not using any of the available options because they're all too irksome feels over the top.
After having had to deal with the aftermath of a hacked Wordpress site that was sending out massive amounts of spam, I would respectfully disagree. I consider Wordpress (and Wordpress plugins, especially) as essentially a security hole that allows malicious actors to gain free access to relatively powerful hardware on fat datacenter pipes, making the Internet worse for everyone around them.
By all means, publish. But don't publish using a platform that allows unauthorized users to misuse your hardware and turn it into a spam zombie/DDOS box/staging box for hacks, etc.
"GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1"
about eight times a day on my lowest traffic sites. And I don't even have WP installed. (Or PHP.)
WP is a distributed botnet farm. I know people who have given up reseller hosting businesses because keeping customer WP installs clean was becoming a 24/7 job for them.
Unfortunately Hugo, Jekyll, etc are a poor substitute for WP, because they're much too difficult for non-coders to use. They're also a poor substitute economically - the WP template & plug-in market is huge.
It must surely be possible to build a blog engine that's secure, easy to use, and easy to customise?
And moreover, I don't agree that not communicating is better than communicating using a less-than-lovely platform... Static generators are fine for publishing but taking into account the requirements for blog-style bidirectional communication (comments, trackback, pingbacks etc.) excludes static sites unless one surrenders control to third parties such as Discus & al.
Wordpress is fine - as long as one carefully selects plugins and culls the unmaintained ones mercilessly.
Well, stuff like hugo, nanoc, ikiwiki... inspirational!
My static site generator is using rake for file rules to do stuff with git hooks. It's going to depend on Ruby, but won't be a "Ruby framework". Rake might as well run php, perl, a bash script or a binary. Rake is just a wonderful tool for the job, and Ruby is about as ubiquitous as Perl these days.
Here's some inspiration: http://patshaughnessy.net/2015/1/8/using-rake-to-generate-a-...
Be sure to check out the "power rake" talk he mentions if you haven't already.
Edit: one more thought. On the idea of teaching casual users "git", I think that's an amazing idea. It touches on tip of an iceberg: computer/scientific/technological literacy gaps. If our technologies continue down the path of "black magic," with the ever extreme dichotomy of priests who know the secrets vs. ordinary/"dumb" people who are locked out of the inner knowledge, it's just not going to be conducive to a bright future.
Remember, regular people are dependent on technology, but have begun to develop superstitions about how it works. It's magic to people!
This is such a deep issue.
As for git. The reason these blogs are so heavy is because editing text files for most people requires a text editor interface on the http which in turn means you need dynamic content whicn in tern means you need a database which in tern means you need a way to submit this code so php which in t... and down the rabbit hole goes. If you get rid of the "editing files requires a text editor" part, then your site is easy and maintainable.
Git I think is a bit more programmer-focused of an api for random blogger joe, but a light wrapper might work. Maybe something like emailing a server with subject "POST: title of blog post" body "text for post" and having the server grab that data from the email, if it came from an allowed user, throwing it into the posts/ folder, git committing it and then deploying it to an apache server on itself. Actions like "delete", "edit" would just search for files with the exact name as in the subject and do the required git action on it.
Something like this could probably work. Email clients already have the text editor users want, why rebuild the wheel? If there was someway to wrap this all up without requiring users actually host their own entire email, I think it would be nice. I think teaching your mom git is a pipe dream unfortunately even if it would fix the Copy-of-Copy-of-Birthday-List_OLD2.txt problem.
I wouldn't put too much faith in email clients html output being sane, or consistent across clients.
You could do it with markdown, but then you're still having to teach them markdown.
Is there any way to install Ruby and required tooling correctly that comes anywhere near to installing JDK?
I never stopped: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/
IMO, lots of blogging platforms add completely unnecessary cruft. Some people may want it, and it definitely can be useful, but not for me.
To make the process not depend on me, I'm considering wordpress.
Hugo and static site generators are nice, but need a developer.
The main two things Wordress has on static generated blogs at the moment are their current community and the editing experience. The editing is of course by design. I have heard that prose.io[0] is nice, but have never worked with it. Essentially webhooked github for cms-free blogs. To me, that seems like the way we should be going.
edit: add link, their site is mainly for access [0] https://github.com/prose/prose
It's still holding us back, though, having a PHP app that a developer needs to edit, instead of allowing any of the team to add content to the site.
[Source][1]
[1]: http://domain.org/dir/
A lot of this is unncessary, I could just be using css. I like that there's not all this asset-flow magic built out, just simple npm with bash cli. Unix philosophy and very little heavy lifting. I think there's still hope.
Now if we can just teach casual users git...
[0]https://gohugo.io/ [1]http://www.blevesearch.com/news/Site-Search/ [2]https://tlvince.com/static-commenting