I’m migrating the site from Drupal 9 back to WordPress. Here’s why…

Life in Drupal Land
Drupal was great! I learned an awful lot by rebuilding the site from scratch and learning first-hand how to configure a website using a modern content management system (CMS), and how to manage all the back-stage settings. I played with themes and plugins, and (mostly) was able to achieve the look and feel I wanted.
Unfortunately, this led to quite a bit of obnoxious maintenance and busy-work. The limited head-space I had for “website stuff” was entirely taken up by performing important security updates to various website components whenever I could get around to it, and searching for solutions to a few tricky issues that remained.
Also I completely underestimated the spam! Well over 99% of all user registration requests and comments that flagged up as “requires moderation” were clearly spam. Which meant I had to shut down all comments and ignore all registration requests. I had no time to deal with that nonsense.
How WordPress will fix this (hopefully)
Look, I had good reasons for shifting to Drupal. It’s the only major CMS that specifically refers to accessibility in its core principles and values, it’s highly configurable, and it’s disproportionately used if you look at stats for the top 10,000 websites. On the other hand, as I discovered, it takes a maintenance to run. Which is ok if you’ve got a team driving one of the world’s top 10,000 websites. Which I’m not.
On the other hand, WordPress allows me access to a bunch of handy tools. As just one example, users can create a WordPress login to join the greater WordPress ecosystem, without my little site getting inundated with spammy user registration requests. Also since WordPress is a standard CMS for small-time bloggers such as myself, hosting providers (such as mine) provide automatic updates for WordPress themes and plugins. Which cuts down on the obnoxious maintenance and busy-work while maintaining site security.
Does this signal a change in values?
Hell no. I’m still motivated to run a blog site that’s as accessible as it can possibly be. With this (re-)migration out of the way, I might find the headspace to occasionally do some writing again.
This site is still about:
- showcasing my writing,
- presenting a sort of online CV and portfolio,
- practicing driving a CMS (both front-end and back-end),
- learn
DrupalWordPress by (re)building the website from the ground up, - and as an exercise in building full accessibility into a website and teaching others what I’ve learned in the process.
Onwards and upwards!