> that coding a Jekyll site to equivalent functionality.
With me it's the exact opposite. Jekyll, a GH actions, deploy to a static site hosting takes under an hour. I know Jekyll, so it's a bit cheating, but yesterday I did the same with hugo, that I never used before and within 1:30 I had a site running on Digital Ocean.
And It's also not because I don't know WP. I've build and scaled a dedicated WP hosting company so I know quite a bit about setting it up :)
In my case it's always because I know the primitives of the web very well: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (and the JS/HTML Web APIs).
WP has layers upon layers upon layers between me and these primitives. Hugo or Jekyll don't: they are as close to these primitives as possible. I know the primitives, I never know these layers upon layers upon layers. They are shifting targets, poorly documented and often horribly executed. So instead of "just using flexbox for this thingy", In WP I need to learn yet another "site builder", or "theme framework", or, worse but rather common: all combinations of all options; infinite amount of permutations that interact, or conflict, or both.
(And yes, I know I can build a WP theme from scratch, staying close to the primitives. But that's far, far more work than 1:30h)
This is just the startup cost. Which is, in my experience, rather high with WP. The real cost comes at maintaining and future development and scaling.
I’m building pretty complex stuff with just Flask and Jinja, and as somebody who also has deep fundamentals it’s so much easier than wading through layers of useless crap these frameworks de jour push in your face.
The problem is that right now the pathways to quickly bootstrap a WordPress site with a good enough, customized theme are hidden under SaaS providers, like hosting companies. Use InstaWP or ZipWP, for example, and you can start in just minutes.
But while you can start in just minutes, you don't have that publishable site that you have in your mind, in minutes.
It takes hours to learn where to find what. To select a good theme. To find the right plugins. To remove the wrong plugins. To then fix some error that comes from removing the plugin. Or to fix an error from installing the wrong one. Experienced WP devs even ask hours for this: people who do this all day, for a living, will charge you hours to build this for you.
Sure, you may be lucky and have some goal in mind that happens to be ridiculous easy with WP. Or you may not have something in mind and just go-with-the-flow to end somewhere that happens to be easy with WP (a good strategy really).
But, in general, I have something in mind. A landing page for a startup. Or the outlines of a webshop, or a simple blog even, and it will take me hours or days banging against WP to get there, whereas with hugo or jekyll that's less than a few hours of banging.
With me it's the exact opposite. Jekyll, a GH actions, deploy to a static site hosting takes under an hour. I know Jekyll, so it's a bit cheating, but yesterday I did the same with hugo, that I never used before and within 1:30 I had a site running on Digital Ocean.
And It's also not because I don't know WP. I've build and scaled a dedicated WP hosting company so I know quite a bit about setting it up :)
In my case it's always because I know the primitives of the web very well: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (and the JS/HTML Web APIs).
WP has layers upon layers upon layers between me and these primitives. Hugo or Jekyll don't: they are as close to these primitives as possible. I know the primitives, I never know these layers upon layers upon layers. They are shifting targets, poorly documented and often horribly executed. So instead of "just using flexbox for this thingy", In WP I need to learn yet another "site builder", or "theme framework", or, worse but rather common: all combinations of all options; infinite amount of permutations that interact, or conflict, or both.
(And yes, I know I can build a WP theme from scratch, staying close to the primitives. But that's far, far more work than 1:30h)
This is just the startup cost. Which is, in my experience, rather high with WP. The real cost comes at maintaining and future development and scaling.