@jac said in WordPress site:
@jac @phenomlab something like this may be more achievable, like I said above I’ve always struggled with the theme when using Buddy press in the past.
You’re not he only one here. I personally have little enthusiasm for Buddy Press’s core package, but it certainly is made more palatable by products like Youzer and BuddyBoss for example. The real issue here is that WordPress relies on PHP for it’s back-end (as does Flarum). This means every time the site is accessed, the PHP code has to be completely loaded before the site will even show. With poorly configured sites, and badly written plugins, this adds severe overhead to the site’s overall speed.
If a site takes more than one second to load, you’ll be surprised at how many people will simply press the back button in their browser and look for something else - me included
NodeBB and Ghost both use NodeJS, which is hundreds of times faster than PHP and WordPress will ever be. Sure, there’s a comfort level with WordPress, but it’s not the platform it used to be, and is rapidly being outpaced by more modern incarnations such as Gatsby, Ghost, and several others - including GRAV which is a flat-file CMS, and completely “database-less”.
Whilst I completely understand the enthusiasm and appeal for WordPress, it can be a difficult animal to maintain if allowed to get to a state where the site is very slow, bloated, and in some cases I’ve seen, really ugly from the UI perspective.
This isn’t designed to put you off, but is generally my experience. I’ve repaired and maintained many a WordPress site. If you want an overview of the transition out, you should ask @justoverclock for his views as he recently moved to Ghost.