Once again, I waded into WordPress hell, this time to post a webcomic on my site. All the advice says WordPress is the best way to do this.
The advice is wrong.
I’ll spare you the details, because you’ve probably been there: installing and uninstalling countless plug-ins and themes, none of which quite look or work right, fighting with widget, menu, and appearance settings until you find yourself staring at PHP code, tempted to wander in like a blind surgeon with a hacksaw.
But there’s a point where just because something should work doesn’t mean it will, or that a “sunk-cost” time investment is ever going to pay off.
Sure, Sparkle can’t automatically generate blog pages for me, but still it was so much faster to just import one of my existing pages (amazing feature), copy-paste the subsequent pages, and manually create “Next” and “Previous” links. In an hour, I’d eliminated all my frustrations and produced the site that I wanted from the start.
I am so grateful for this program that I’m switching to a monthly subscription.
I second that. Our website was also done using WordPress at significant cost – I had to hire someone. My own “wakeup call” happened when we released a new version of our software. I changed one single digit: I changed “5.0.4” to “5.0.5”. For this unforgivable sin, the text layout get messed up!
At that point, I realized that the WP site is not maintainable and that I better write-off the sunk cost.
It’s like a confirmed hypothesis - replicatable across the world!
It is the marketing spin that get’s us to believe it is anything else and for all it is it doesn’t deliver half of what it says and then there are the constant headaches! WordPress was created by developers and has been hacksawed to bits to make it the greatest spaghetti plugin online monster!
The web has become so complicated with these developers’ created back ends called CMS! So give me Sparkle anytime for its simplicity, stability, and well thought out platform that just works!!!
Just feel all that anger bubbling over. That platform is a waste of time, and I’m happy to be rid of it. (Well, except for my blog. I’ve got my fingers and toes crossed that we may yet see a blog solution for Sparkle, and I can get rid of that iFrame window sawed through the scenery of my lovely Sparkle site so that janky old WordPress can show through.)
I recently had to update a WordPress site for a new client, who had asked for help about 3 weeks ago … a WordPress installation with countless plug-ins that had not been updated since 2015!!!
It was a nightmare.
The positive outcome of this though: I will redesign the entire website for this new client in the coming months. So the headache lead to a new Sparkle project. Yeah!
OH MAN!!! I’m having a real forehead-slap moment: It only now occurred to me that I can run my webcomic as a gallery on a single page – with all the lovely little navigation bits (forward/backward arrows, thumbnails, etc) that are already built into Sparkle. That also makes it dead-simple to update, too.
It’s just too easy! Now the whole webcomic site is just three pages!
Everybody is saying that Wordpress together with Divi is sooooooo easy.
Everyone is soooooo wrong.
I have tried and tried and not getting.
I have used Sparkle for many years and I think it is greater than anything.
Yep, it took me a while to finally wake up. And I wasted far too much money on themes, programmers etc for zero return. Since moving my blog to Sparkle, I’ve done everything myself without having to resort to Fiverr for help. And my site looks soooooo much nicer too! Thank you Sparkle!!! I’m just waiting now for v3 and that long awaited blogging component which I just know is included
I’ve recently finished two Wordpress contract Jobs. One using Divi and one using Oxygen Builder. Both have so many unresolved and ongoing problems that require workarounds that are fundamentally silly options.
The belief that Wordpress makes it easy to build websites is based on:
a) the marketing budgets of said page builders - namely Divi. Oxygen does have an integrity to their claims. If Divi was a car they would be telling us it was a private jet. At least Oxygen is clear about what it is built for.
b) affiliate programs that incentivise false marketing by affiliates to receive a sales commission
c) no advertising oversight or regulation in this sector
And one of the key indicators is hiding right in front of our eyes; Wordpress is not a website builder. It’s a blogging platform!
Used by default as a blogging platform it’s okay. Overlap a page builder, which is fundamentally a limited design application, then sandwich in between poorly regulated plugins and you have a Frankensite just waiting to go haywire.
Even after 6 weeks completing the above projects I still have unanswered questions on dedicated forums for each platform regarding really simple issues which no one can answer. I simply don’t have these issues with Sparkle.
I built my first website around 1997/98. Sparkle is simply the most robust and reliable website building platform I have ever used.
If Sparkle had a robust blog feature I could have easily convinced the contractees to go with Sparkle.
I’m going to give that a try. I’m in the middle of updating my personal/work site and need an integrated blog as part of an ongoing project. This might be just what I need, and I won’t have to bother with linking to a wordpress blog.
Dropinblog looks great, but I can’t justify $19 a month for a part of my website that makes no money (and has way more than 250 posts).
I would pay a hundred bucks or more to have such a thing for my site, but not nineteen (or forty) bucks a month forever, or risk losing all my content.
Very good point. I didn’t go further than look at the pictures because… well. However, the good news is that meantime I’m beginning to get the hang of Sparkle’s blog function which looks like it will perfectly fulfill my needs. I’m giving serious thought to getting ‘Trust in Duncan’ tattooed somewhere on my person.
Yeah! 
