Its convenient. Not everyone wants to waste their life centering divs you know
It’s the only CMS that runs on a classic AMP stack which is still the standard with cheap web hosters. And since everyone and their dog is using it, you can easily find support and ready-to-use plugins for almost anything.
In the car world, WordPress is your plain old petrol car that just runs, can easily be refuelled and you can get anything repaired at every other street corner. That’s why it is still so widespread.
Right, because the only alternative to using spaghetti old code is making your own, not using one of the many actively maintained free software.
Among many others you’d easily find if you give up on the hivemind of taking the most popular approach.
Ghost runs on NodeJS which isn’t available at most cheap webhosters. Also it doesn’t do traditional blog things like pingbacks, trackbacks or webmentions.
BearBlog can’t be self-hosted at all - it says so right on their GitHub’s README.
WriteFreely is a Go binary that - again - isn’t supported on most cheap hosters. Also I can’t seem to find anything about it supporting pingbacks, trackbacks or webmentions. It seems to be more like a one-user Mastodon instance.
first one isn’t free
second one you have to migrate posts using ctrl+c ctrl+v and then hand type the publish date
third one you have to already have built your own SQL database
You can try it, but I switched from Ghost to WordPress because of auto updates. Default ghost docker image doesn’t pin the correct DB version which causes errors, and watchtower updates break your website. Also, very little in the way of existing plugins or themes. Typing a new article doesn’t give much in the way for formatting.
Way more documentation on the WordPress side of things and just general QoL stuff. Plus, free templates. Spaghetti it is, but spaghetti works and I don’t feel like using Hugo.
