Wordpress has been around for a long long time.  I remember using it 20+ years ago.  They make the claim that it powers 1 in 3 websites including some of the largest news sites out there.  

One of the benefits of Wordpress is that it takes the programming out of your hands.  The only thing you worry about is the content and the look and feel (theme).

It has a lot of plugins that make it easy to do pretty much anything you want on the site from a discussion forum to a storefront.

For simple websites it is probably overkill, but if you don't have to worry about things like programming and making it look good on both computers and phones, why bother?

I think the concern that Larry has about the tools going in and out of fashion is legit, but I doubt that Wordpress is going to go out of fashion within the foreseeable future.

The thing that seems to come and go are the plugins.  Developers may lose interest in maintaining a plugin so it may stop working if Wordpress is upgraded in a way that changes the hooks that the plugin uses.  

I've had a few plugins that I loved end up disappearing that way.

So, when ever I build a web page I look very closely at the plugins I'm planning on using and how my data might be affected if it loses development before I decide to commit to them.  I tend to stick to the commercial plugins because they tend to stick around longer than non-commercial ones.  

James

-----Original Message-----
From: Rhodes22-list <rhodes22-list-bounces at rhodes22.org> On Behalf Of Larry Gioia via Rhodes22-list
Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2020 1:10 AM
To: The Rhodes 22 Email List <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>
Subject: Re: [Rhodes22-list] Website Development

This may be a good description of how to integrate AWS Cloudfront / Wordpress / S3:
  
https://blog.lawrencemcdaniel.com/integrating-aws-s3-cloudfront-with-wordpress-2/
  
It probably requires the least technical experience (still needs documentation of how to maintain) but is subject to changes in or loss of support of the components that integrate Wordpress with AWS (not Wordpress itself, seems like it will always be stable) over the years.
  
Peter’s prototype is like the website my small company has created and maintained for 22 years: handcrafted HTML with CSS. Not subject to changes in integrated components, but does require more programming skills that are becoming harder to find.  It requires a person like Peter or myself who understand it. 
  
It’s difficult to decide: the trend is more toward integrating components vs doing underlying programming, yet the tools used go in and out of fashion. 
  
Several people have said to go the route requiring the least technical programming (which may be AWS/Cloudfront/S3 described in the link above) and it’s hard to disagree with them. 
  
Larry