It’s hard to argue WordPress has been the dominant blogging platform since forever and while it’s still widely used for blogging, it’s used more-so as a content management system if anything else. This site uses WordPress, but to be quite honest, doesn’t take advantage of any of its CMS features like post types and whatnot.
The Growing Micro/Static Blog Movement
There has been a growing trend in the blogging space (mostly developers for the moment) using Markdown based blogging platforms that use actual files and parse them into HTML instead of needing a database or any complicated features like plugins.
Some of the logical choices for a self-hosted static blog are:
Is The Return To Basics A Trend Or Here To Stay?
WordPress itself started out as basic as most of the above aforementioned platforms, but as users found new creative ways to use WordPress and saw it as a framework more than a blogging platform, the features of WordPress grew along with its users.
The desire to want a platform that is just for blogging is understandable. WordPress can be a resource hog and if your blog posts are mostly text with the occasional image, do you really need a database for that? Flat file blogging applications make sense and I think the more that people realise WordPress is overkill for only blog use, the more people that will resort to using something smaller and easier.
Conclusion
WordPress is great for use as a CMS. If you’re building both a site and a blog in one, then it makes sense to use it. But if you’re like me and your site is just a blog, there are other options. Maybe it’s fine WordPress being a CMS and another app stepping in and filling the void of simplistic blogging.
Services like Medium.com and SVBTLE show there is interest in wanting to just focus on the content and nothing more.
