Hello community,
I am looking for a system to replace wordpress.
My goal is to build a webpage with a simple start page, an ‘about me’ and an impressum, so nothing special, but hopefully good looking.
I only use open source software, FOSS whenever possible. I have a rough understanding of some HTML, CSS, PHP, but I am happy if my future webpage doesn’t rely too heavy on my knowlege of those languages.
Wordpress feels very over the top and not many things work out of the box - you have to pay for premium products if you want a functional page, that doesn’t look exactly like twenty twenty-two. I wanted to move my wordpress site from one host to another host… Not easy, unless you pay for a plugin of course.
Now I found ModX, a CMS which looks like it is much less clunky, has more free ‘plugins’ and it looks quite intuitive with it’s folder structure.
My questions:
- Has anyone used both CMS and can compare them based on their personal experience?
- What CMS or other way do you prefer to build your simple webpage (FOSS only version)?
Edit: Thank you all for great recommendations and for sharing your experience! I learned: A full CMS is overkill for my usecase. Other, more suitable options, are:
- Flat-file CMS (Grav, Automad,…)
- static-file-generators (Hugo,…)
- Emacs-org-html-export (…)
- Build from scratch with html and css
Another neat trick is to generate your website on your own PC and only publish the static version.
You can publish static files to a CDN service, which costs very little compared to traditional hosting that includes a dynamic language and database.
A CDN is also usually distributed across the world and has cool features like built-in scalability and redundancy which means very little chance of outages, can deal with traffic spikes, and fast response no matter where the visitors are from.