I’ve built hundreds of CMS websites in the last decade; a good chunk of them on WordPress. The relationship was great at first, but the last few years seemed like watching your car get keyed by your soon-to-be-ex because you didn’t put the Valentine’s Day card on the refrigerator.
Side note: WTF Happened to WordPress?
The fracture was predicted in 2017. I tried to stick it out. Major WordPress contributors voiced their concerns. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg continued to push new “features” that were unhelpful and counterproductive. Some WP devs now explicitly say “WordPress sucks”. Meanwhile, WordPress security continues to be abysmal. No more sticking it out. It’s time to move on.
Searching for a CMS
I spent many hours reviewing at least 45 CMS in detail. Here’s what I was looking for:
- Open Source.
- License fee is ok. Subscription service is not ok.
- Headless option for static site generation (SSG). Preferably GraphQL.
- User friendly (no code).
- Dev friendly (nice docs).
I tried to stay language agnostic and considered CMS written with Node, PHP, Go, Ruby, etc. I suspected/hoped the result would be Jamstack, so I was actually surprised to settle on Statamic (PHP).
Other top contenders were Strapi, Craft CMS, Webiny. Although these and a few others might have potential, they started to fall apart in my initial development trial, and Statamic came out as the clear winner.
Statamic Day 1
Starting from knowing literally nothing about Statamic in the morning.
- Installed and running using Laravel Valet.
- Learned mostly by watching the Statamic training series.
- Built all the collections, content fields, and structure.
- Learned about the “Bard” field… it lets you build content like Medium!
- Built custom hero, wells, gallery, etc.
In short, I built an entire working backend demo in a day. For those familiar with CMS, you may realize that this is incredible progress for the very first day. Other software has taken more time just to debug an install error. So far, I’m very happy with Statamic.
Bonus:
Every time I read the Statamic docs, I get a fun flashback to the 80s and 90s. Rad.
