Drupal is what I use. In addition to the blog part, have enjoyed creating custom content types to track some interesting things in my life (cars, phones, and computers for example). Then I add a view to show them all in a table with the columns and sorting that I want for that particular content type.

In the past I have used the APIs to a very small extent. I stored license keys for an app as a content type so that they were easy to manage by employees, and the app connected to a service that called the API.

Probably any fleshed out CMS will check all but the last one of your boxes (nothing is going to be "extremely" easy to host).

Have a look at serendipity. Certainly doesn't have "tons" of plugins but it's had all the ones I need, and it's dead simple: PHP and either a Mysql or a postgresql database underneath. I've used it for years, happily.

What? Gatsby plugs directly in to WordPress. That's the whole point.

Have you considered something like Ghost? ghost.org

Ghost looks great and very polished! For me though, it provides much less out of the box (no built-in comments etc). It's also harder to self host and manage and the hosted service costs 30$/month which is extremely pricey for an indie blog. 3rd party ecosystem for wordpress (plugins/themes) is huge. I can easily extend my blog to an e-commerce store, an online community etc.

> It's also harder to self host and manage

Eh, I disagree. The only difference is that it uses Node instead of PHP. You still hook it up to MySQL/MariaDB/SQLite and you're good to go.

Plus I consider its Members feature (https://ghost.org/members/) to be a game-changer, though it's powered by Stripe, so you'll have to be in one of 39 countries supported by it to make it work without extensively hacking your theme.

That's a big difference. I can't use a cheap shared hosting and managing a VPS (os updates, database backups etc) is too much for a small blog. Node.js is fine but it turns out after all these years, php is still the king in crud,blog,cms type of application, which is the 99% of the websites out there.

As for the members feature, wordpress has tons of "membership" plugins. Still though, Ghost landing page for members[0] does a great job explaining why i need this. Excellent design and copywriting

[0] https://ghost.org/members/

Hey! John from Ghost here :) here's a direct comparison of setting up self-hosted WP vs Ghost, just as a point of reference: https://youtu.be/rMKNgV1gTHg

That sounds exactly like October CMS.