Updated on December 10, 2021
Time for yet another blog status update, albeit a brief one.
The blog moves back to WordPress
As you can see (unless you’re reading this via RSS), I’ve switched the blog back to WordPress, after almost a year on Ghost.
While I’ve enjoyed using Ghost (as I wrote in the last blog status update post), I’ve run into some limitations on what it can do:
- The lack of free themes to choose from; meanwhile, the paid themes are too expensive.
- Customizing Ghost themes isn’t easy. It’s also compounded by theme updates basically requiring one to manually re-add any changes.
- No native comment support; adding such requires a third party (which often charges) or installing self-hosted software (which isn’t easy).
- The inability to re-use already uploaded images, since Ghost doesn’t offer a media library.
- Ghost requires some technical skill to maintain.
- Finally, there’s still a lack of web hosts that support Ghost.
Thus, after a lot of thought, I’ve decided to switch back to WordPress for now. Among the other benefits, I also now have comments back!
WordPress concerns
That said, I’m still not wild about some of Automattic’s choices about WordPress. The Gutenberg editor and some other decisions feels like they’re more focused on WordPress competing with Squarespace than, well, blogging. Thus, I’ve installed the Classic Editor plugin, which makes WordPress work like it once did. The Classic Editor plugin’s due to be supported until 2022; however, given the sheer number of downloads it has (over 5 million to date), I imagine there’ll be a similar third-party replacement. I did give the Gutenberg editor another look; however, I still wasn’t feeling excited about it.
That said, I’m also considering installing ClassicPress once again. Migrating the blog from WordPress to ClassicPress just requires a migration plugin ClassicPress’ creators make. While it has some of the same flaws as WordPress, ClassicPress also uses the old editor, making the Classic Editor plugin unnecessary. That said, ClassicPress also requires themes/plugins to basically support WordPress version 4.9, which some creators (like the Yoast SEO plugin) are dropping support for as time goes on.
Finally, the theme I’ve installed is called “Fairy.” (Update: I didn’t use Fairy very long; I’ve switched themes to Gambit, which is working out much better.)
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to respond below.
“WordPress Stickers Everywhere” by StickerGiant is licensed under CC BY 2.0 (Flickr / cropped from original)
Oh! I missed the news that you moved back to WordPress. I found out in your recent post about moving to the Neve WordPress theme.
It’s nice to be typing a comment in the regular WordPress comment form.
And I whitelisted your site for ad blocking. I’m glad you mentioned that in your recent post. While I totally believe in supporting websites that have ads, I mostly have the ad blocker because there’s a handful of sites that run TONS of ad trackers that slow the down the site. I installed the ad blocker just to block those sites. Oh, it’s so nice to not have my fan run when I visit those sites. But now other sites get blocked. Most times, sites will have those popups requesting that ad blocking be turned off—which I’ll immediately do.
Anyhow, I’m glad to see you back on WordPress. Although, I would have been just as happy to see you thrive on Ghost too.
Thanks for whitelisting the site! And yes, while I liked Ghost, WordPress was a bit easier to do or more robust for certain functions, so I moved back.
Guess the WordPress comments were more popular than I thought. Or at least more popular than the makeshift comment systems I tried on Ghost…