WordPress Alternatives
for Individual BloggersFlat CMSs vs. SSGs

Abstract

Bloggers today realize that traditional content management systems —and WordPress first among them— became repleted with many features and capabilities that often exceed their needs and requirements as individual bloggers, to the extent that these features may seem a burden on their shoulders.

The Current State of Traditional CMSs

Those advantages that have become a burden for many, are reflected in four aspects:

• Relying on databases, with what this means in terms of expertise and maintenance that front-end developers in particular may not have.
• Multiple users (bloggers): Although the individual blogger is the only user (editor) of his/her blog in this case.
• A third aspect that compelled bloggers to resort to databases is the issue of receiving comments from site's visitors. However, with the emergence of social media, the interaction between the blogger and its readers gradually moved from its blog to those platforms, and people became —little by little— reluctant to comment on blogs' pages themselves. With the emergence of Disqus and other blog comment hosting services, the direct comment service on blog pages has almost faded.
• Blog's Control Panel: An individual blogger, if technical, often prefers to write in Markdown format and upload the article directly to the server via FTP for example, without using a web interface of the content management system used.

Alternatives to Traditional CMSs

Static Site Generators (SSGs)

In the face of this increasing inflation situation, which is witnessed by traditional CMSs, from individual-blogger's perspective, several alternative systems that take simplicity and speed as a basic principle in their structure have begun to appear, the most famous of which was Ruby Jekyll system, which works to generate static HTML pages (Non-dynamic) based on Markdown files created by the blogger, meaning that this system will not need any type of processing from the server side, but it is sufficient for the blogger to create his/her article in Markdown format, and then generates an HTML version of it to display on the blog pages.

For this reason, this category of content management system has been termed "Static Site Generator", or SSG for short.

Since a SSG system is ultimately composed of static HTML files that do not require any type of processing by the server as we have indicated, it outperforms traditional systems in terms of performance.

But by doing so:

1. Does not involve any interactive interface to manage or edit articles. This can be bypassed for a technical blogger who is fluent-enough in handling Markdown format and server handling tools, such as FTP protocol and generic control panels…
2. Visitor does not usually have the advantage of searching across articles.
3. Unless user (blogger) is proficient in Git or any of other Version Control Systems, SSG will seem for him/her to have a lack of flexibility in managing updates.

Flat CMSs

Faced with the second and third limitations, a third category of content management systems has emerged that tries to combine the advantages of the previous two categories:

1. Dynamic: Web pages are automatically generated from article files (often in Markdown format), similar to traditional systems and unlike SSG systems.
2. But flat: Adopts files instead of databases as a solution to store content in them: the same as SSG systems and unlike traditional systems.

The admin panel issue is leaved as an optional feature that can be installed as a plugin.

SSGs vs. Flat CMSs

The following table shows the main differences between SSGs vs. Flat CMSs.

List of the Most Popular Flat CMSs

Consequently, what are the most prominent flat dynamic alternatives available for content management?

Below I review the most prominent of these alternatives, and compare the characteristics of each.

It should be noted that the cells highlighted in red are still in need of revision, however, I chose to publish the article as it is, rather than keeping it locked in drawers, claiming that it is incomplete, hoping to complete work on it in the coming days.

Conclusion

• SSGs are the best choice for expert technicians who are better at dealing with Git or others to manage the blog and update its content, as it is the least at consuming server resources.
• FlatCMS are less technical, and perhaps the only skill that should be mastered here is writing in Markdown format.
  • At a quick glance at the above table, it appears Pico and Grav are the two most mature options among them, due to their superiority in adopting simplified file formats, such as Markdown, YAML and Twig.

if (flatCMS && !SSG) {
    echo "Grav or Pico; that is the question!";
}

Despite the maturity of Grav compared to Pico, I favored Pico and its simplicity over Grav and its maturity. In other words, I favored Pico despite its lack of support for multilingualism, over Grav which is about to crowd out Wordpress with its maturity and sophistication!