Back in September, I blogged about how I moved to Statamic from Textpattern after 15 years of service. After just two months, I'm moving again, and this is a short explanation why…
First, a recap. I've been using Statamic v2 for over a year on all my clients' sites and loving it, but when it came to changing my own site it coincided with the freshly launched v3. I thought I'd dive straight in, but it turned out be a painful process.
- With v3 there was much more faffing around with command line, installing homebrew, composer, and then statamic. The joy of v2 was unzipping an a folder and pointing a virtual host in Mamp at it - it took seconds, not days, to get up and running.
- I found issues where the answer was "Oh that's a Laravel thing…" so now you have two systems to learn. Great for Laravel developers I'm sure, but not for me. For instance, having to specifically serve the site from a /public subfolder rather than whatever root folder you had.
- I've found v3 more fragile than before - it was even easier to bring the whole site down because of a small error on one page. I was constantly emptying caches to get things working - publishing changes to my site required me to do three shell commands afterwards to ensure the whole site wasn't down.
It all felt like a big ball ache, but despite this, I stuck with it. I still loved the flexibility of how you can use content, with the ease of templating, and I trusted their direction.
However, Jack revealed he voted for Trump, and then doubled down in a spectacularly tone-deaf fashion. This is not an opinion about your favourite breakfast cereal. Political opinions are not kept harmlessly in a vacuum, they have real physical, and in the case of Trump, terrible consequences to people. They reach so much further than U.S politics. I can't 'agree to disagree', and or respect his opinions, but neither am I here to launch an attack on Jack. Someday I might get the chance to sit down and have a drink and a chat with him, away from the pitchforks of Twitter.
Moving existing client sites away from Statamic is unrealistic, but my own site is a different matter. The CMS is developed by more people than just Jack, but to summarise, continuing to use Statamic just didn't sit well with me. I waited a couple of weeks to make sure I wasn't just having a knee-jerk reaction, but I still felt strongly, even though it meant I had to put in more work.
So, now I'm using Kirby! More on that in the next post…