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
I have done this, but instead of PHP, I have used Server Includes, which is a performant and simple way to add repeating headers and footers etc without extra dependecies. Nginx, Apache and Caddy all supports Server Includes, but with different syntax. I have used Caddys templating language, which I am most comfortable with.
Removed by mod
It actually works great for slightly more complex stuff to, like converting markdown to HTML etc. Caddys documentation is made using Server Includes for example.