For whatever reason, I became bored and dissatisfied with this site. I neglected it for nearly a year. After another deep-dive into the rabbit hole of the indieweb, I am filled with the desire to have and maintain a personal website once again.
Which means that, as per my M.O., I've been spending way too much time reading through CMS and static-site generator documentation.. Trying to find the perfect, F/OSS, self-hostable solution to having a web presence. And of course, the perfect solution doesn't exist. So, I'm allowing myself to just pick a poison and run with it. Make that two poisons. I'll drink from both founts for an undetermined length of time which will hopefully give me insight into which system I prefer.
Bludit.
The flat-file, no database backend, CMS. Almost exactly what I'm looking for. So close and yet lacking in ways I can't get over. Bludit is the runner-up contender I will sadly be putting down and walking away from.
The good:
- Admin backend is very concise and well laid out.
- Content creation is quick, painless, and has rather sensible defaults. Expanding the meta-data for content is not a struggle and all options are easily accessible but not "in your face overwhelming."
- WYSIWYG HTML AND MARKDOWN EDITOR!!
- Semi-easily themeable with some nice third-party themes available.
- Decent, if outdated, plugin ecosystem.
The bad:
- Doesn't appear to be actively developed, for all appearances the project is in maintenance mode. Not necessarily a non-starter for my needs but...
- Plugins are also mostly out of date. They're PHP based and I have no way to tell how secure they are nowadays. Several plugins' repos are non-existent as well, so no documentation.
- Themes are PHP based and I don't know the language, so yet another hurdle to customizing my site and making it my own.
- Content is kept in JSON structure and doesn't appear to be easily extracted from the CMS.
- The community surrounding Bludit was in its prime back in early 2000s from what I can tell. The forum is fairly dead and any support I can search for is either in French or at least a decade old.