I'm done with Wordpress (for now)

I have a new site. It is different than the old one.

I'm a Wordpress developer who knows how to make Wordpress themes and plugins. I also know how to add or edit content easily through Gutenberg or their Classic Editor. However, at some point I started thinking about getting rid of CMS's entirely and starting simple. The site you're browsing now is created with Next.js and all blogs are (for now) uploaded as a simple markdown file. And for now that might be all I need.

While being a Wordpress user, I did like the ability to log in to a backend to manage content and the extesibility of the site through plugins. What I didn't like was a mediocre theme situation and the amount of garbage that accumulates on a Wordpress site through years.

What do I mean by a mediocre theming.

Wordpress is the most polular CMS out there with a multitude of nice themes and plugins to try. However, almost each theme comes with its own set of "necessary" plugins and assumptions on how the site should look. It took me days to find and customize themes I was OK with just to start my search for something new after a few months. Some themes were paid with lots of options to try, others were free with paid upgrades. While paying for quite a few of them, I didn't find anyhting that would be exactly what I wanted to achieve on my portfolio site.

Over the last year, I started moving away from PHP.

Wordpress sites are based on PHP which I have nothing against. It is reliable and does its job. However, I find it hard to work with and over the last year or so, I started working with Javascript and react frameworks. I did build a few sites using headless approach (frontend build with React but Wordpress is still used to manage user's content) and I do think that I can be more efficient and creative without having to incorporate PHP onto my frontend code.

What will come next?

As I mentioned, this site uses static files and at its code, it is Javascript, HTML and CSS. My goal for 2022 is to launch a satisfactory theme that is mobile friendly and is quite fast. I will use 2023 to polish my theme and add new content. I'm thinking about trying out Prismic.io or KeystoneJS to host the content of the site. Who knows... maybe I will go back to Wordpress to host my blog posts but wont let it manage my theme?