Over the Christmas holidays of 2014/2015, I switched my blog from WordPress to the static site generator Pelican. I did this mostly because static site generators was the new hotness among geeks, the geek factor was high, and I wanted to try something new. I really like the idea of a blog where I would write blog post in Markdown, and not have to deal with a backend admin interface, or depend on a database. I chose Pelican because it is a Python program and it uses the Jinja2 Templating engine. I absolutely love both Python, and Jinja2 and I have written a lot in Python and Python-Flask. It would therefore be quite easy for me to make changes to an existing template or make my own template.
However, after over nine months of using Pelican I migrated my site back to WordPress. I absolutely understand why many geeks and especially programmers find static generators so appealing. Pelican works just fine if the content is 99.9% text and all you want is a simple blog. I have my own opinion of how a blog and especially my blog should look and function and Pelican simply cannot provide that with any existing template and plugins. I love to code but we all have to choose our battles and when it comes to my site, I want to write content, not the site itself. WordPress offers so many features either by default or via a plugin that I did not even think of until I did not have it.
I will write about my experience with going back to WordPress and some of the plugins I use in another blog post.