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If you wanted to create a niche content site what platform are you building on in 2023?

Joshua Dance
4 replies
Wordpress is probably the default. Webflow is new but their blogging interface is frankly bad. Ghost is an option but has less plugins that Wordpress. What would you choose? One wrinkle is that we want to include custom coded pages (calculators, interactive examples) as well. Any CMS systems play well easily with custom code?

Replies

Rick Roberts
The extreme end of what you are talking about would be a headless CMS I think. Have you considered something like Storyblok or Prismic?
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Momcilo Popov
always a Headless CMS! :) (a shameless plug: https://thebcms.com)
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Matt Sutherland
I like Contentful, but there is a lot you have to build yourself so it ends up costing quite a bit. Headless Wordpress is pretty cool. It takes a fair amount of tweaking to make sure SEO is done well, and most plugins won't work. However, most tools you can integrate directly anyway. Webflow is great for how fast can you can take a design and have it implemented. Definitely the cheapest to build, and you can do quite a bit of custom coded pages.
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Robert A. Skidmore
Headless WordPress is pretty nice. I've also done some hybrid stuff in the past. You can load a small javascript app onto a WordPress page since all it really needs is a dom node to attach to. WordPress lets you load custom js bundles on a per-page basis so you can load your app only on the page that needs it. Then you can build your calculator/interactive examples with whatever library you are most familiar with (React, Preact, Solid, JQuery - if you want to go old school) and just interact with WP through the GraphQL or Rest APIs. Then WordPress can control the main parts of the website like the blog and the normal pages. All of the WordPress plugins will still work. You don't have to worry about SEO on the majority of the site since WP will handle everything but your little apps. You also don't have any of the complexity of going full headless. I've built a full headless WP with a Next.js frontend and, even with the headstart that Next gives you, there is still a lot to set up. TL;DR I'd say if you are trying to integrate a content site into an application then go headless WordPress. But if you just want a content site with some application-like features then embrace WordPress and add a few small js apps to the pages that you need.
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