The lack of native support has always been a problem, in anything, especially for things 0 should have been simple and intuitive, like having a subtitle on an article.

WordPress seems to have been here forever. I remember back when we used to decide between it and Joomla, in the 2005 – 2006 Era, when these two platforms were still in their begenings. It has come a long way since then, but it is not without issues.

Everyone will talk about how bloated it is now, and how SEO unfriendly it has become, especially with all the new features and millions of plug-ins, let alone the security issues that rise from time to time. But it is not those topics that got me thinking about the need for an alternative. It is the simple things.

I was creating yet another WordPress template for a client, a simple blog template. Just text, with the occasional image or two per article. Simple requirements, and yet, the writer is left with the same complicated backend, massive Html headers and bloated code that loads tons of small elements that are totally unneeded for the use case. But it hit me hard when they requested that each of the articles have a title and a “subtitle”. WordPress does not support subtitles natively, nor does it provide a standard way of doing it.

It reminded me of the debate we had a few years back about HTML support for subheadings as semantics. Yes, there are tens of ways around it, but the lack of native support comes with so many unnecessary issues and workarounds for the workarounds, to be SEO friendly and accessibility friendly, with screen readers and text only browsers, and to be semantically comprehensive, etc.

The lack of native support has always been a problem, in anything, especially for things 0 should have been simple and intuitive, like having a subtitle on an article.

The more generalized a platform gets, the more complicated simple tasks get, and hence rises the need for a specific solution customized for a simple use case, like having a subtitle for each article, or implementing the minimum headers and no external dependencies of a web page. And to be frank, the open source community has so much small tools to allow for such custom builds, quickly and effeciently.

This problem of choosing to go with a custom solution for a specific task used to cost a lot more than utilizing a ready-made general solution, but in my opinion, we are now at a point in software development history where the cost of development is at such low point that it doesn’t matter anymore, because the difference between custom implementation and utilizing a generic solution is trivial.

I believe this is why we have so many blogs now built entirely by the blogger, from scratch, either as dynamically created pages, or static pages generated from a simple database. Heck, some are even using text or markdown files to generate corresponding static blog pages. Despite how much that feels like the early days of the web. Building such platform nowadays is merely a tiny fraction of the manhours needed to do the same task back in the late 90’s.

Conclusion? I might consider rebuilding this “blog” from scratch, it is easy, specific and, to be frank, worth it, considering how a solution like WordPress is.