Leaving WordPress for AI-powered flat PHP
Herve Family
1
Posts
1
Posters
0
Views
-
There’s a certain type of blog post I sometimes save for later. Not because I want to re-read it right away, but because it’s worth revisiting in six months to see how things actually played out.
“Migrating PerezBox From WordPress to Flat PHP in 90 Minutes” is one of those posts.
I actually migrated perezbox.com from a full WordPress installation to a flat PHP site with zero external dependencies.
No database. No frameworks. No build tools. No package managers. No node_modules. No Composer. No plugins. Just PHP, HTML, CSS
The “I migrated away from WordPress to something simpler” post is a classic of the genre. I understand the appeal, it can be tempting. In fact, I have tried migrating away from WordPress in the past. About fifteen years ago I tried Jekyll, as a way to experiment and try something new. I came back to WordPress. Twelve years ago I tried Ghost, partly for the same reasons. I came back again. And I published another reaction post 10 years ago, responding to a post saying WordPress was doomed, static site generators were in.
I won’t try to convince you not to try alternatives to WordPress. In fact I think you should, from time to time. It’s healthy to look at what’s on the other side of the fence from time to time, it’s always a good learning experience. I do, however, think we should always be honest with ourselves about the trade-offs.
Whether it makes sense depends a lot on the type of site you’re running and how often your content or design actually needs to change. For the right project, a flat-file setup can be a good fit.
Here are a few questions I would ask, 6 months from now.
Are you still using your custom solution?
WordPress is much more than a post editor ; it’s an ecosystem. And it’s easy to underestimate everything you take for granted until it’s gone. Galleries, embedded content types, archive pages, category views, comments, all the little things that just work. And that’s not even taking plugins into consideration, and the myriad of other features they can bring to WordPress. A few months in, when you need one of those things, you’ll have to build it from scratch or accept that your site won’t support that.
WordPress comes with so many little things that come bundled with the software, we don’t even think about them. A good example may be responsive images. It may sometimes seem like bloat to see so many different image sizes generated every time you upload a new image to WordPress, but those can be useful in so many different places.
It may not be a feature you’d put in a comparison table. But it’s one of hundreds of small things the platform does for you without you ever having to think about it.
Are you still publishing?
This one matters even more to me. When your publishing flow changes, when it’s no longer a matter of opening a familiar editor (on desktop or on mobile) and hitting publish, the friction adds up. And in a lot of cases like this, people just… publish less.
That’s obviously less of an argument with AI: AI can help you with that flow, can publish / push for you, can write your posts for you. AI does change things, for building sites as much as for everything else.
Generating code has become (too?) easy. You can reinvent the wheel for every project if you want to ; no need for a library, a plugin, or a third-party service when you can just ask an AI to build you a custom one.
But it cuts both ways. You can’t say your site has “zero external dependencies” and then build your entire publishing pipeline around Claude. That is a dependency, a significant one. It’s a paid service, you don’t control it, it can unreliable at times, it can change its pricing tomorrow. You can certainly do without it and edit files the old fashioned way, but then we’re back to the problem I mentioned above. It becomes considerably harder to publish than it ever was with WordPress.
So the real questions become: once the site is live, how easy is it to maintain? If updating it requires leaning on AI every time, are you comfortable with that trade-off? Is that really simpler than what you had before, or just a different kind of complexity? Did you trade one dependency for another?
I am really curious to see what the future has in store for us, and for WordPress as a whole. I’ll check back in six months I guess 🙂
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
-
There’s a certain type of blog post I sometimes save for later. Not because I want to re-read it right away, but because it’s worth revisiting in six months to see how things actually played out.
“Migrating PerezBox From WordPress to Flat PHP in 90 Minutes” is one of those posts.
I actually migrated perezbox.com from a full WordPress installation to a flat PHP site with zero external dependencies.
No database. No frameworks. No build tools. No package managers. No node_modules. No Composer. No plugins. Just PHP, HTML, CSS
The “I migrated away from WordPress to something simpler” post is a classic of the genre. I understand the appeal, it can be tempting. In fact, I have tried migrating away from WordPress in the past. About fifteen years ago I tried Jekyll, as a way to experiment and try something new. I came back to WordPress. Twelve years ago I tried Ghost, partly for the same reasons. I came back again. And I published another reaction post 10 years ago, responding to a post saying WordPress was doomed, static site generators were in.
I won’t try to convince you not to try alternatives to WordPress. In fact I think you should, from time to time. It’s healthy to look at what’s on the other side of the fence from time to time, it’s always a good learning experience. I do, however, think we should always be honest with ourselves about the trade-offs.
Whether it makes sense depends a lot on the type of site you’re running and how often your content or design actually needs to change. For the right project, a flat-file setup can be a good fit.
Here are a few questions I would ask, 6 months from now.
Are you still using your custom solution?WordPress is much more than a post editor ; it’s an ecosystem. And it’s easy to underestimate everything you take for granted until it’s gone. Galleries, embedded content types, archive pages, category views, comments, all the little things that just work. And that’s not even taking plugins into consideration, and the myriad of other features they can bring to WordPress. A few months in, when you need one of those things, you’ll have to build it from scratch or accept that your site won’t support that.
WordPress comes with so many little things that come bundled with the software, we don’t even think about them. A good example may be responsive images. It may sometimes seem like bloat to see so many different image sizes generated every time you upload a new image to WordPress, but those can be useful in so many different places.
It may not be a feature you’d put in a comparison table. But it’s one of hundreds of small things the platform does for you without you ever having to think about it.
Are you still publishing?This one matters even more to me. When your publishing flow changes, when it’s no longer a matter of opening a familiar editor (on desktop or on mobile) and hitting publish, the friction adds up. And in a lot of cases like this, people just… publish less.
That’s obviously less of an argument with AI: AI can help you with that flow, can publish / push for you, can write your posts for you. AI does change things, for building sites as much as for everything else.
Generating code has become (too?) easy. You can reinvent the wheel for every project if you want to ; no need for a library, a plugin, or a third-party service when you can just ask an AI to build you a custom one.
But it cuts both ways. You can’t say your site has “zero external dependencies” and then build your entire publishing pipeline around Claude. That is a dependency, a significant one. It’s a paid service, you don’t control it, it can unreliable at times, it can change its pricing tomorrow. You can certainly do without it and edit files the old fashioned way, but then we’re back to the problem I mentioned above. It becomes considerably harder to publish than it ever was with WordPress.
So the real questions become: once the site is live, how easy is it to maintain? If updating it requires leaning on AI every time, are you comfortable with that trade-off? Is that really simpler than what you had before, or just a different kind of complexity? Did you trade one dependency for another?
I am really curious to see what the future has in store for us, and for WordPress as a whole. I’ll check back in six months I guess 🙂
-
WordCamp Bretagne revient !
C’est maintenant officiel, WordCamp Bretagne est de retour en 2026, le 18 septembre, encore une fois à Rennes, encore une fois au Couvent des Jacobins.
Marquez la date dans vos calendriers, on se donne rendez-vous là-bas !
-
What kind of customizations did you have in mind? What would you like your site to look like?
I’ve learned to really appreciate the flexibility of the block-based themes in WordPress ; they offer a lot that was previously only available to folks comfortable with PHP. That said, this is mostly about layout and display. If you want to display custom data, you may still have to dive into code to get what you need. That is, unless someone else already developed it 🙂
The ActivityPub plugin includes more and more blocks that can help bring Fediverse functionality to your site, to create real Fediverse profiles for authors. If you have ideas of more things we could implement, please let us, either in the WordPress.org support forums for the plugin, on GitHub, or right here (you can ping @pfefferle or me any time!)
-
Notre commune a un site officiel qui sert beaucoup. Toutes les annonces officielles y sont publiées, et sont ensuite partagées sur les réseaux sociaux, essentiellement Facebook, mais aussi LinkedIn. YouTube aussi est de plus en plus utilisé ; les réunions du conseil y sont streamés en live, puis donc disponibles sur le long terme, et mises à disposition sur le site (et donc dispo par RSS aussi). De nombreuses catégories peuvent être suivies via des flux différents, ce qui est très utile.
Certaines communications sont encore seulement publiées sur Facebook malheureusement, mais le pense que les choses se sont améliorées de ce côté là. On peut maintenant se tenir au courant d’une grande majorité des nouvelles de la commune sans se rendre sur Facebook. Bon, on est loin de la présence sur le Fediverse tout de même 🙂
Toute cette présence est à mon avis le résultat de beaucoup d’éducation et de discussions, et pas quelque chose de forcément naturel pour chacun des élus. Il y a un grand contraste avec les communications de tous les partis se présentant aux élections, y compris le parti de la majorité, qui communiquent essentiellement via Facebook, ont des sites qui ne sont pas à jour, ont leurs programmes disponibles sur Facebook et pas sur le site, …
-
One vaut, 4 main folders (using the PARA method), many (too many) subfolders. I think it could be better, but I haven’t found a better way yet. I’m not too worried about it though, I rely on search, bases, and internal links to navigate across my vault and it works.
-
I’ve been building an RSS reader for the past year. No unread counts, no inbox to clear. Just a river that flows at its own pace.
Today it’s live on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I wrote about everything that went into it.
Current, an RSS Reader, by @tgCurrent is a new RSS reader that takes a really interesting approach to how we consume feeds. Instead of treating your subscriptions as a to-do list with an ever-growing unread count, it presents your feeds as a river; articles flow in, linger for a while, and eventually fade away on their own.
Although the app is mac / iOS only, and paid, it’s not completely closed. You can hook it up to existing RSS backends like Feedbin or Miniflux.
The completionist part of me does miss the idea of reaching “inbox zero.” For me, inbox zero was never about obsessive consumption (or at least I like to think so); it was the permission to walk away. When I’ve read everything, I’m done. I can close the app and move on with my day. I wouldn’t want my RSS experience to turn into a TikTok-like endless scroll where I just keep going without thinking. Current isn’t exactly that though, and that’s where its velocity system gets really interesting.
Each feed gets assigned a half-life that determines how long its articles stay visible. Breaking news fade away faster than blog posts for example. This means the app naturally surfaces content proportionally to its nature; a prolific news site won’t drown out the small blogs you actually care about. The pace of consumption adapts to the pace of creation, which feels much more respectful of both the reader’s attention and the author’s intent.
On top of that, Current watches your reading patterns and offers suggestions to help you “quiet” noisy sources. If a feed floods your timeline with 18 articles in one day, or if you keep skipping posts from the same source, it’ll nudge you to rate-limit or mute it.
I would give the app a try, but it’s iOS and mac-only so far, so I guess I’ll have to wait! 🙂
-
Could you check that the ActivityPub plugin is still active on your site? You seem to be using the Friends plugin but the ActivityFun plugin itself seems disabled.
You can also post in the plugin’s support forums if that doesn’t help ; we’ll be happy to help!
-
If you’re an old-time blogger, you probably remember Freshly Pressed. 16 years ago (!), the folks at WordPress.com launched a new blog where they highlighted interesting blog posts from the WordPress.com community every week.
We iterated on the idea a few times over the years but the main idea stayed the same:
a curated collection of posts that entertained, enlightened, and inspired. It was our way of saying “we like you, we really like you” to creators, and amplifying their great work for others to find.
Great Writing Deserves a Spotlight: Freshly Pressed Is BackFreshly Pressed went away for the past few years, but I’m happy to say that my team brought it back! It’s got a fresh coat of paint and most importantly, it’s got quite a few interesting blog posts already!
Im really happy and proud that we were able to get this done. Today, more than ever, I think we could use a bit more humanity on the web.
The old web felt like a city. You could turn down a random alley and find a weird little shop. You could get lost and discover something beautiful by accident. You could end up in a tiny shop you didn’t know existed or sit on a bench and people-watch.
Now it’s a mall. Every path leads past a store. Every store wants something from you. Even the “public” space is engineered to keep you moving toward purchase.
Straight from today’s Freshly Pressed post, I miss being unmarketable on the internet.So check some of those blogs out. Give them a Like. Leave a comment. Start following them. And if you find good potential candidates for the next Freshly Pressed post, send them my way! All you need to be featured is a WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress site running the Jetpack plugin, and most importantly, an interesting, or funny, or unique story to tell!
Bonus: if you’re more of an RSS person, you can also get Freshly Pressed posts straight in your RSS reader via this feed. Pinging @davew, I know you’re always looking for good feeds 🙂
