Difficulty is relative

Today I read a thought-provoking article on Wordpress, claiming that Wordpress is not easy. Now, I'm by no means an expert on Wordpress but I do have my fair share of experience with it, from all points of view. Having switched from it to Ghost and with a better idea on both platforms, I found the comparison amusing.

It should be noted that the article in cause speaks about the subject from the perspective of a client with no programming experience, which makes things even funnier. It's a weird humour, but bear with me.

So, why is Wordpress hard?

First, there’s the major hurdle of web hosting:

-What is web hosting?

-Where do I get it?

-Who is the best?

-How much does it cost?

-Who supports me?

I understand where this is coming from, but it's still funny that finding good Wordpress/PHP hosting is difficult, considering that is by far the most popular platform.

And the installation?

Then you have to GET WordPress installed on the web host you finally chose:

-How do I get latest .tar.gz there? (wtf is .tar.gz?)

-1-Click install or something else?

-What’s this database thing?

-Who is sparky?

-Did I do this right? Can someone help?

For Ghost on DigitalOcean is rather easy, I have to admit. They do have an image that comes with it preinstalled, basically an 1-Click install but I was brave enough to install it myself, from scratch.

But the updates... oh, the hassles. And making sure the blog is always up. There are many things to consider when running a NodeJS and it's certainly a bit more complex than PHP.

Although in the end things are similar, I was genuinely amused by the article. It almost felt that Ghost was to me what Wordpress was to a total novice. And it does not stop here.

I learned most of the things I knew about hosting, SEO and web development by fiddling around with PHP scripts and platforms, of which Wordpress played a large role. You could say it was an introductory course.

And then I took thing to the next level with Ghost. It was then that I started doing more complex things, self-managing my VPS and learning even more things.

This makes me wonder, what now? Maybe writing my own blogging platform? Who knows. One thing is for sure, the cycle will continue.