We review what happened between the WordPress and WP Engine platforms, and we discuss some good alternatives to this well-known blog manager so that you can start your own website without going through any scares and paying as little as possible.
A couple of weeks after the creator of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, decided to start a war with the service provider WP Engine, we can say that WordPress has been going through some difficult days.
At the moment, a total of 159 employees at Automattic (parent company of WordPress.com) have left their jobs, and thousands of users around the world who used WP Engine to host their websites have experienced problems after Mullenweg pulled the cable to leave them without service, although it was restored shortly afterwards. Now, WordPress.org requires its users to confirm in a box that they are not “affiliated in any way” with WP Engine in order to log into their accounts.
the drama
To recap for those who haven’t heard about the drama: WordPress.org is an open source (and free) content management system that hosts 40% of all websites on the Internet worldwide. That’s a lot. WordPress.com, for its part, is a private company, which nevertheless contributes part of its work and income to the WordPress open source project.
It is in this context that it is understood that Mullenweg exploded against WP Engine at the end of September. The programmer accuses this other company of taking advantage of WordPress resources with misleading advertising, even though they do not contribute anything to supporting the platform’s open source. «What WP Engine offers is not WordPress. It’s something chopped up, hacked, dismembered to make it look like WordPress, but in reality it’s a cheap imitation and they charge more for it,” Mullenweg explained in his blog.
Although all this trademark fuss is probably foreign to you, you have to understand that WordPress is used by a gigantic number of individuals and companies around the world, so any problem with the service, whether obtained by the organization nonprofit (WordPress.org) or another payment provider, it can have serious consequences. WordPress has always been one of the best options for those who want to open a blog, rivaling in its day with the, now almost obsolete, Tumblr or Google Blogger.
Alternatives to WordPress
Although WordPress is a great tool (it offers many utilities for businesses, and also has an interesting community of readers for those who write personal blogs), there are more alternatives that you can turn to if this mess puts you off. In addition, we must remember that WordPress.com costs your money, which is not little, especially for those who are only looking for a personal blog with a clean aesthetic and without embedded advertising.
To start, we will say that, if you do not want to resort to alternatives and want to stay on WordPress, one piece of advice we can give you is to use the open source platform instead of WordPress.com. Because? Because it’s free. It is true that, using this, you will have to pay for a domain (a .com, .es, etc.) separately if you want one, and also that you will have to watch a tutorial on the Internet to create your blog. But that effort will most likely be worth it, saving you WordPress.com fees.
And now, we are going to discuss other CMS (content managers) that are gaining popularity due to their simplicity, low price or optimization for certain types of content, such as newsletter (WordPress allows you to send newsletters, but it is not so specialized in them ). This is a list that developer David Darnes has published on his blog.
- Ghost: A simple, minimalist platform to launch blogs or newsletters.
- Magic Pages: A CMS for Ghost that greatly simplifies the process and offers you more tools.
- Craft CMS: Platform for blogs and websites that offers a free plan for individual creators.
- kirby: A basic but pretty CMS, hosting all content in text files. Also ideal for people with knowledge of web development so they can customize and get the most out of it.
- indiekit: Something similar to Kirby, although it requires a database to manage the content.
- ClassicPress: It is a fork of WordPress, and therefore very similar. Keep in mind that it still uses the WordPress API, so it is not ideal for those who do not want to know anything about its platform.
- Statamic: A modern CMS, which also offers a free plan for content creators.
- Wagtail: An open source CMS that runs on Python.
- Textpattern: Probably the most minimalist and simple CMS of all, focused on text and also open source. Recommended for writers who prioritize text over images, videos, etc.
Of course, we can also add Substack as an option, a platform specialized in newsletters that, however, also serves very well as a personal blog or even as an online newspaper/magazine.
