Blog of Andreas Jung, ZOPYX

Going Wordpress

Andreas Jung -

I am moving corporate sites to Wordpress  🤡 -t his is not an April 1st joke!!!

I am currently in progress moving some of my corporate sites and some project sites from Plone to Wordpress. I struggled a long with the decision what to do with my almost ten year old corporate sites. I spend almost two year into static site generators, custom HTML page builders, frameworks like Tailwind UI kit and many more.

I always had an eye on Wordpress of the last years but stability never convinced me. In fact, I could break a fresh Wordpress within minutes...but this has not happened yet with Wordpress 5.6.

As a proof of concept and for getting deeper into Wordpress, I created a new project site (not online so far) for checking various site builder options, extensions and add-ons and deployment options.

Here is my current stack:

  • Wordpress 5.6 (installed and maintained through the wp command line utility)
  • Porto theme
  • Elementor Pro as site builder (feels supernatural compared to WPbakery)
  • Smart Slider 3
  • UpdraftPlus for backup and restore (stores all data on Dropbox)
  • WP Mail SMTP for mail
  • Caldera Forms - a super intuitive form builder
  • miniOrange 2 for 2FA
  • FileBird Lite - for folder support under "media"
  • DSGVO AIO for imprint/privacy and cookie alerts
  • WPPaint - for manipulating images
  • Duplicator - for cloning a WP site
  • Matomo Analytics#
  • Sucuri Security Suite
  • WP Fastest Cache

My current Wordpress 5.6 setup appear rock solid and it's just doing the thing. "The thing" is creating (more or less) shiny websites and focus on content. The available theme for Wordpress leave a lot of room for your own corporate identity. I do not care so much about tiny design details and I don't want to invest a lot of time and money into my "own" theme.

In the end, the decision was based on "getting things done" in a reasonable timeframe and for a reasonable investment.  Of course, Wordpress leaves too many styling options for content creators but that's exactly what Wordpress is for in the first place: building shiny corporate sites, landing pages etc. This is not the primary scope of Plone and the primary scope of Plone can usually not be covered by Plone. So there is no contradiction here using Wordpress as a Plone solution provider.