A comparison of web platforms
Tags: wordpress, react, jekyll, bootstrap
Published: 2021-04-11 10:42:06

I've been fortunate enough to work with a number of platforms for website development, including Wordpress, Jekyll and Bootstrap. However, I've gone through several "phases" or periods in my journey as a developer in terms of what I do and want to accomplish, and as such my needs when it comes to web development have changed since I created my first Wordpress.org site in 2015. Today, I want to talk about what I use and my opinions/overall thoughts on these platforms.

# Starting out
In 2015, I was starting to become a bit of a tech geek, interested in new phones and computers, and I started learning about websites and wondered about building one. I was working on [building a replica astromech droid](http://ar.skinetics.tech/stellarios/compass) and thought it would be cool to build a weblog, or blog, about this topic. The first few websites I built were simple drag-and-drop generators - uKit, Wix and Weebly were the platforms I used. However, right from the start I knew there were a few things that I wanted included in my website:

1. Forums/Discussion board
2. Photo gallery
3. Newsletter subscription

Number 1 was especially important to me. I'd shared my build log on sites like astromech.net (a story that I'll share another time) and I wanted to create a community of robot builders - not necesarily just astromechs - that discussed the technical workings of these beautiful creations. However, almost all platforms I found that were "free" either didn't work due a lack of features, or they were ad-filled messes that looked horrible. I learnt a little about web layouts and UI/UX by using drag-and-drop solutions, however without access to a credit card I was never going to get very far (never mind the fact that my data would never be owned by me and instead would remain the property of the website provider). 

Long story short, I found someone willing to sponsor me for a wordpress.org site and after some trial and error I got together a good-looking website with plenty of plugins and functionality. However, there were a number of problems that [I'd frequently run into](http://ar.skinetics.tech/stellarios/):
* Long loading times - partly due to plugins and the hosting provider
* Frequent errors and breakages - plugins
* Unable to backup properly due to the size & complexity

For all the benefits of Wordpress as a CMS and web platform, there's plenty of downsides as well. Its reliance on plugins is both good and bad - it means that the platform doens't need to have tons of mostly unneeded features built in and opens the doors to thousands of developers - but the open-source nature of Wordpress means that these plugins vary in quality and support:

1. A free plugin is shared on the wordpress network by a single developer
2. The developer treats it like a side project, maybe getting some donations from a slowly growing userbase
3. People start finding bugs with the plugin and feature requests start popping up on the support page
4. The developer gets burnt out and starts spending more and more time on his plugin(s) until eventually he loses interest

There were a huge number of plugins that I used (mainly oriented around Buddypress) on my wordpress install that were a few years outdated, which led to security risks, a slow website and plenty of other issues over the four year life-time of my website. Eventually I started programming and developing themes and plugins for Wordpress, but another problem was becoming apparent: after a few years of trying to build this "robotics network", the website was 1) rapidly morphing into something else and 2) there was virtually no user engagement (this was discussed in more detail on the SK devlog, linked above). 

I had, as I mentioned been introducing coding into my Wordpress experience for a while, but I wasn't skilled enough to get my site to where I wanted it to be by maintaining everything by myself. Add to the change in purpose of my "web network" (including going into game development with my newly created team), and a major breakage of the Wordpress site, and I decided to go it alone and venture into the world of Bootstrap & static site generation, which I had a little more knowledge about in terms of development. 

Tomorrow, I'll talk about Jekyll & Hugo, two developer-friendly platforms often used for journals/blogs & documentation sites.