I’ve used WordPress as my CMS of choice for over a decade now. This was primarily due to its nature and origins as a blogging platform — it did what I needed it to do and made the act of creating content downright fun.
In the past 10 years, though, there has been a slow and steady movement in the WordPress community away from the blogging aspects and more towards its use as an all around basis for website development. This hasn’t been all bad, as it has added some useful features, I’ll admit, but has made the overall experience of using WordPress for a relatively straightforward blog a bit annoying. I shan’t go into details here as I’m still recovering from the sprained fingers on my right hand, but it suffices to say the largest issue has been with themes and their evolution.
You may be surprised to find most every “modern” theme of any form is clearly built around the ideas of larger sites, e-commerce and “news” types as opposed to conventional one-post-after-another blogs. Perhaps I could work around with them if I put in a bit more effort, I’ll admit, but as it stands things feel like an absolute clusterfuck no matter what option I try, with many of them simply not having what I’d consider to be very basic options or, if they do have them, you have to buy the premium version.
Oh yes, that’s another thing — just about every theme is now just a shell of itself, with the rest available as a premium upgrade. Obviously I understand wanting to make money from your work, but for a theme to be nearly unusable without me paying 50 bucks is a bit absurd; I can’t even try out some features to see how they work without having to commit to an oddly ambiguous purchase, and I’m just not going to waste time and money doing that.
As such, I’ve reverted to a theme I’ve used for several years which, sure, hasn’t been updated in a while, but also has provided me a very solid base to work from, even if it has a few limitations I don’t like and I’m not skilled enough to change. It’s better than other options, that’s for sure, at least… Good old Frontier, it’s like being home again.
Everything is just kind of a mess with WordPress — blocks on blocks, even for widgets, what feels like a half dozen selector options just to accomplish basic tasks, and no matter what you do something still just isn’t quite right.
In retrospect I think this shift in the feel of WordPress is part of why I’ve not been writing much the past few years — every article feels like a chore. Maybe I just need to refine my workflow, or maybe find the right plugins to speed things up. I don’t know. I guess that’s something to look into moving forward.
Details will come, once I recover from this injury. This has already been a bit too much of an entry to type out, but I felt it worth it. Now to recover, as my right middle and ring finger are killing me. :\
Try ClassicPress, a fork of WordPress 4.9 , based on WordPress without the f*g block editor (Gutenberg)… ‘old fashioned’ way !