I Want to Dump WordPress for Laravel

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For at least a year I have been annoyed with WordPress, not because it went from the classic editor to Guthenburg but because it now uses React and I hate the idea of using React because it was a FaceBook project. I don’t trust Facebook and I don’t want to use anything related to them.

I don’t want to use FaceBook because it reminds me of the life I don’t have, Instagram because it switched from being a network of friends to a network of spam, WhatsApp because it’s owned and controlled by FaceBook so privacy is at risk, and finally React because it is part of the FaceBook universe.

I was tempted by the Occulus Quest a few years ago but I didn’t buy it, because it would ingest me into the world of Facebook. If Facebook, now Meta, was caught being unethical and immoral, and said sorry, and did something to fix the situation, then I would rethink how I feel about the company. The reality is that when they’re caught being immoral they just wait until we forget about it. That’s not how a social network should be, especially one that experimented with making us feel negative, and was caught helping with spreading disinformation to the right people to get Brexit to succeed, and Trump to be elected.

But What About PHP?

I know that some of you will ask “But if you refuse to use React, why don’t you feel the same way about PHP? PHP was developed in part by Facebook years ago, but it came of age when I didn’t have a negative opinion of Facebook yet. I don’t want to use React because I don’t want to make it easier for Facebook to have a monopoly on the World Wide Web.

I also feel happier learning to use technology where I am not competing with everyone else. I still studied Vanilla JavaScript via several courses and understand how most functionality works, even if I can’t write the code from scratch without help.

Back in 2004 and earlier I was playing with every framework I could find, installing it, seeing what I could do, and then moving on. I found WordPress and my learning reached a plateau. During the pandemic I started to study how CSS and other technologies worked until I found that PHP and Laravel feel intuitive compared to other technologies. I wanted to use Angular but I got stuck, so I learned Vanilla JavasScript, then Python, and then PHP, and finally laravel. With PHP and Laravel I got things to work without struggling.

I did get stuck with Laravel, with permissions, which is why I studied “Let’s Learn Laravel: A Guided Path for Beginners. I am at section 15, “Deploying To A VPS”. After that the course will be done. I still want to follow courses on how to make Laravel secure. My goal is to make my website a showcase of my understanding of Laravel.

And Finally

Although replacing WordPress with Laravel would be a fun goal to achieve I think that the first step is to turn the static part of my website into a dynamic one. Once that is achieved then I can see whether I want to migrate my WordPress blog to Laravel, or keep things as they are. Security wise it makes sense to stick with WordPress, until I know more.