Why WordPress

In this article, we will discuss why I chose to invest in WordPress.

Intro

I decided to use WordPress on my personal website and blog. Since I am fluent in Ruby the alternatives were Jekyll and Rails.

The requirements

When I started researching how should I build this blog I had some clear requirements in mind.

These requirements were the bare minimum and the list that follows is not the complete feature set I had in mind. Some things would be nice to have whether I chose Rails or WordPress or something else entirely.

So, the must-have were:

  • I should be able to focus on content creation(that means minimum plumping and maintenance)
  • My budget is small. I should be able to spend my budget on books and lessons to get better so that I can serve a higher quality content.
  • Minimum troubleshooting. Again content is the focus here. I love troubleshooting and I will write about many issues I face daily in my job and in my personal projects or open source. But the blog should act as a means to transfer this information.

With these clear requirements in mind, I began my quest to explore many platforms. Eventually, I only considered seriously Rails, Jekyll and WordPress.

The evaluation

I chose WordPress. Rails would need either managed hosting(too expensive for my budget) or maintenance from me(less time for content creation). Jekyll was a good alternative but was missing many plugins

WordPress has over 30,000 plugins. I could host my content relatively cheaply. The maintenance would be minimum.

Outro

The above worked fine for me, but another technology stack may have been a better solution or it may have been a better fit for somewhat different requirements.

Choose whatever technology stack you feel comfortable with and have a clear plan to start researching the alternatives.