Why is this site built with WordPress?

The truth is that I don’t particularly enjoy working with WordPress as a platform. In general, the development experience is pretty ugly. Even though it has improved quite a bit over the years, it is still far from much more enjoyable experiences like Wagtail with Python or, if we’re staying in PHP, a Laravel project.

But WordPress isn’t really focused on the developer. It’s focused on an end user who can do pretty much anything from the admin panel, including breaking the entire site.

So, back to the question: if I’m a developer, why would I choose WordPress as the platform for my own site?

The reality is that, as much as I sometimes hate WordPress, I have to admit that it just works. Within a few minutes, I can have a functional website, with good SEO and the ability to publish posts or updates fairly easily, all on very affordable hosting.

In fact, if it weren’t for the need to publish posts, I probably would have built a static HTML site with some nice CSS and called it a day. No React, Vue, or anything like that for this.

With Claude’s help, the whole site came together in a very short time, in two languages. That gave me a first iteration that was good enough to get online. In the meantime, I could have some mate and play with my son while the AI did part of the work.

Is it the best site I could have built? Not even close. There is still a lot missing, and it could be improved quite a bit, even while keeping the same framework. But within a short time, the site was online with everything I basically needed.

At another point in my career, I probably would have spent days or weeks getting the code exactly the way I wanted before putting a site like this online, with a codebase I would absolutely love.

Today, I approached it more as a product than as a developer, and that changes the perspective. You start valuing time differently, and you can make some technical compromises in favor of practicality or speed.

It’s the same idea as learning to build an MVP instead of forcing everything into a perfect, fully-fledged final product.

So, this is what we shipped. Now we iterate.

Depending on how it works out, we’ll see if we need any more significant changes. But for now, we’re up and running, cheaply and quickly.

The truth is that I don’t particularly enjoy working with WordPress as a platform. In general, the development experience is pretty ugly. Even though it has improved quite a bit over the years, it is still far from much more enjoyable experiences like Wagtail with Python or, if we’re staying in PHP, a Laravel project.

But WordPress isn’t really focused on the developer. It’s focused on an end user who can do pretty much anything from the admin panel, including breaking the entire site.

So, back to the question: if I’m a developer, why would I choose WordPress as the platform for my own site?

The reality is that, as much as I sometimes hate WordPress, I have to admit that it just works. Within a few minutes, I can have a functional website, with good SEO and the ability to publish posts or updates fairly easily, all on very affordable hosting.

In fact, if it weren’t for the need to publish posts, I probably would have built a static HTML site with some nice CSS and called it a day. No React, Vue, or anything like that for this.

With Claude’s help, the whole site came together in a very short time, in two languages. That gave me a first iteration that was good enough to get online. In the meantime, I could have some mate and play with my son while the AI did part of the work.

Is it the best site I could have built? Not even close. There is still a lot missing, and it could be improved quite a bit, even while keeping the same framework. But within a short time, the site was online with everything I basically needed.

At another point in my career, I probably would have spent days or weeks getting the code exactly the way I wanted before putting a site like this online, with a codebase I would absolutely love.

Today, I approached it more as a product than as a developer, and that changes the perspective. You start valuing time differently, and you can make some technical compromises in favor of practicality or speed.

It’s the same idea as learning to build an MVP instead of forcing everything into a perfect, fully-fledged final product.

So, this is what we shipped. Now we iterate.

Depending on how it works out, we’ll see if we need any more significant changes. But for now, we’re up and running, cheaply and quickly.