Thoughts on using Wordpress in light of the Village Hall experience

I had mixed thoughts here (March 2020 or before). While I can see some advantages of using Wordpress there seems to be just as much work, if not more, in getting a solution that works for you. If you just want to build a website then you need to select the theme that works best for you. If you want to create your own theme and possibly make it available for the "community" then you need to learn a lot of PHP and the "Wordpress Way". Both of these options seem a lot of work to me.

Philosophical Dilemma

I feel that using Wordpress denies me the ability to design my own code from first principles. While this is a personal thing as I enjoy working out how to do things in HTML, Javascript and CSS. I even have had a chance to play around with some PHP, all these things that are key in developing themes for Wordpress. However, to operate at that level I would have to get far too involved in things that have a passing interest.

The spam control that WP use (quite effectvely) maybe a mute point as WP is such a target. Having my own forms is possibly not as bad an idea as I first thought. I have now enabled my own form on the VH website (not that anyone uses it!), so far it has not been spammed. This probably due to the fact that it cannot be found as it is not spidered as effectively as a WP site - this could be a good thing. Also, I am beginning to think that Google makes too good a job of indexing WP sites. SEO is not really an issue for the VH - it is more a question of how the potential visitors use the Internet.

Testing Village Hall Forms

It seems that the forms have to be tested from time to time. At the time of writing this all the forms apart from the "Contact" page have been disabled.

I have also noticed so strange things when I access the VH website using Tor. Sometimes the visits get logged by Jetpack and the email from the Contact form looks different on the Tor browser and although the message says it is sent, it isn't.