Hi all,
I’m trying to start a couple websites for personal blogging and a small business, and am looking to use WordPress. One question I can’t really find an answer to is this:
**By using WordPress, am I locked-in, in the long-run, based on the way the software structures my site? Will it be hard to** ***stop*** **using WordPress if I want more customization?**
Obviously if I knew more about the different programming languages and protocols involves, this might be obvious. I only know a bit of HTML, CSS etc, learned Java and Python (since forgot them), and know some basic stuff about how servers and the web works.
I know that my data is always mine with WordPress, and that’s why I want to use it as opposed to Squarespace or something (previously used Wix, and it sucks to not have access to the code). My goal for the personal blog part of my website is to make something so interesting and compelling that people want to scroll through and go down the rabbit hole of my thought, aided by interesting design and moving parts. Part of my “work” is about digital exploration itself, so I want to showcase prototypes for what I imagine a better, future web to look like. It’s like philosophy of the structure of digital content, and interrelationships between objects, and human language. This, I presume, requires completely custom code, which I am willing to learn / make up.
If backtracking, getting off WordPress, and going fully custom just requires a few steps, that’s no big deal. I just don’t want to fully redo everything as I learn more about what solutions I need. I’d rather start from scratch right now.
An alternative way to ask this, betraying my ignorance: **Can I use WordPress as** ***just*** **a CMS, or does WordPress inherently structure my content** in its own WordPress way that I may someday have to manually translate (across hundreds or thousands of pages)?
My ignorance, I guess, has to do with how multiple programming languages interact, how server-side and browser-side webpage assembly are strategized, and how these decisions affect functionality, and then **whether WordPress makes some of these decisions** ***for me.*** I guess this is like, when does Content Management might become Content Orthopedics (helpful, but limiting), and when software that performs backend for you starts to limit your front end.
**Extra:** I know many features of WordPress are actually run by third-parties, like Woocommerce for shopping. I know I can’t build *everything* myself, but I would also like to know about making my own paid-content system. This is another place where I have a philosophy I’d like to prototype in the website itself. Like, most content free, some content behind paywall, then users can make accounts, and then certain content will bother you if you view too many “trust-based” pages without donating afterwords. I understand this is a novel idea and some people will be like “just use substack bro” but I want to set my own terms. An extension of this would logically be a way to manually block/approve IP addresses on a case-by-case. This gets into some ideas I have about how web security could be more personal and human(e), so I’ll stop rambling.
**Thanks for any answers, even short yes/no**
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Damn man…its like a bloody novel. I didn’t read all paragraphs but I think I got the conclusion when I read until Squarespace. WP is amazing and super flexible I’ve experimented a lot from 3D views, JS animation scroll based to make it like animation cartoon (I made some also imported from Adobe Animate) etc…
You can always export your content if you want to move to a different platform.
Your 2nd question refers to plugins – yes, you can paywall selected content. There are several “content restriction” plugins.