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Fellow bloggers, I know many of you swim in the vast sea that is WordPress. It’s free, easy to get setup and has lots of automatic fixes in the form of plugins. As far as blogging engines go it’s pretty nice.
Today I’m going go make a case or three for why you may not want to use WordPress for your site, though. And tell you why we moved from WordPress to ExpressionEngine and finally to Craft CMS. Ready? Here it goes.
WordPress Weirdness
When we started this blog (formerly Last Night Ago), I was busy, didn’t want to pay for software and thought I’d give WordPress a shot. For my clients at FortySeven Media I have historically always built ExpressionEngine sites, so this was hard for me to deal with at first. But I wanted to give WP it’s fair shake.
It lasted about 8 months. During that time I ended up fighting with the system for so many little things that I couldn’t believe how many people used WordPress on a regular basis. Did you know that WordPress doesn’t store it’s paragraphs in the database with <p> tags around them? True story. Here’s a few of my issues (keep in mind this was about 3 years ago so things may have changed):
- Images uploaded from our phones weren’t rotated properly. Had to add a plugin to make that work, but it didn’t fix things retroactively so I had to re-upload a bunch of images.
- Image management in general was abysmal. The interface is confusing and weird. You only get 3 options for resizing, and WP stores all those versions in the same folder as your main images. So if you happen to change one of those other sizes you just bloat that images folder - and because the image linking is done through the text editor field and not the templates, it’s hard to change the sizes of your images site wide (like you would during a redesign). I’ll explain how images are handled so much more elegantly in other systems later.
- Every plugin we added bloated our pages in ridiculous ways. I’m mean we were looking at 20 javascript files and 20 css files that were adding very little value, but slowing our pages down massively. This is my biggest gripe with WordPress - how it injects a bunch of code you don’t know about into the front end of your site.
- While the publishing area has come a long way, I still don’t agree with how images are inserted into content, custom fields feel like they’re hacked on and most importantly Ashley found the whole thing pretty confusing. She hated it.
Security
The last straw for me after fighting with all these little things was the security issues that WordPress has. If you don’t upgrade immediately you’re going to get hacked. The problem is upgrading all the time causes potential incompatibilities with plugins. And you need a lot of plugins to make stuff work right. During one of those in-between times, our site was indeed hacked. After that I just blew it up and re-built in ExpressionEngine. That worked fine for another year or so. But EE has it’s own set of problems. While it’s more secure and doesn’t need constant updating, you have to throw about $800 - $1,000 worth of licensing and add-ons to get a good publishing experience. And even with that we were flying blind publishing without built-in live previewing.
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Ya’ll!! I am so excited! (I guess when I’m excited the country in me comes out) We did it! We have found such an amazing family to live in our RV (Rocksteady). We have prayed and prayed for the right family to come along and 4 days before our ad expired on RVTrader, we got the call! All that worrying, and stress was not needed. I should have known. Every time we have had a worry or doubt, God has showed up in such a big way. I don’t know why, but it surprises me every time!
We got a message from Charlie. He told us that he and his family were interested in our RV and would love to have his parents come out and check it out! Meet Charlie and Becca, and their family!
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Hey Longneckers! How’s the healthy eating going?
Well, I’m glad you asked! We have made one little change to our plan. While I would love to be able to say that we eat perfectly all the time, that just isn’t going to happen. When we are traveling to amazing places, you better believe we will be trying the local cuisine. So, we need a plan that is going to allow for us to not beat ourselves up if we want to eat our weight in tacos when we make it to Mexico!
We have decided that every 10 days we are going to allow ourselves some slack. A cheat day, if you will. A day where we don’t have to think about the fact that we really want to have a slice of bread with our zoodles (zucchini noodles). A day where if it’s hot out and the kids want to grab an icee, I get to say OK! A day where we don’t beat ourselves up for giving in to that piece of chocolate that has been in the freezer all alone for 16 days without any attention! I’m talking about balance y’all. I NEED BALANCE! A whole month of eating very strict just isn’t going to work long term for me. I need a system. So, every 10 days we are allowed to eat that bowl of cereal or go out to eat if we feel like it.
We had our first cheat day last Sunday. To say we went overboard would be an understatement. I found myself drooling over recipes to make donuts for breakfast, and what could I make as a special desert for the night? It was ridiculous guys! We jumped in that pool of gluttony and we hit rock bottom. We ended the night playing UNO for M&Ms but instead of the usual 6 M&Ms, they may have been dumped on the bed and it became a free-for-all.
We went to bed laughing and having a good ol’ time from our sugar high. But then we we were awakened with the most God awful sound at 12:45am. Jax comes running to us, “Ada’s puking in her bed!” I’m pretty sure I will not be able to eat M&Ms for a very, very long time. It was the worst puking episode we have ever had. Usually the kids are able to get up in time and we get them to the toilet or grab them a puke bucket. Not this time. I ended up throwing out her sheet and was doing loads of laundry until 2am. NEVER AGAIN!
From now on, it will not be a whole day of eating terrible. We will choose only a couple things to splurge on and that’s it.
So, what I hope that we are creating is truly a lifestyle. Not a diet. I can already tell a big difference in the way my clothes are fitting so that’s encouraging. I am hoping that the cravings will start to go away soon. It’s bad that all day I think about food. It’s really sad, and I know it’s not healthy. I’m working through it but dang, what I wouldn’t give for some homemade bread right now.
Our next cheat day is Wednesday and we have already planned what we are going to do. We’re going to pack up the bikes, and surprise the kids with a trip to Boise! It also happens to be the location of the closest Chick-fil-A! The kids are going to flip out.
So, if you have any good recipes that don’t have grains or sugar in them, feel free to share below. We like simple things that don’t take forever to make.
So long friends, drink a MexiCoke for me :)
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It’s been almost a month, but I couldn’t forget to tell you about Jett’s birthday weekend. Last year we went a little overboard and let the kids pick their own birthday adventure and let’s just say it was a bit expensive. They all had amazing days that they chose, but this year we wanted to get back to simplicity. And back to nature. So, we will (hopefully) be taking a tent camping trip for each of their birthdays this year.
For Jett, we picked out 2 awesome nearby campgrounds and let him chose which one he would want to go to. He ended up choosing Wallowa Lake State Park. We booked it online and assumed it would be great weather since the last 2 weeks here in La Grande were absolutely beautiful. Well, we checked the weather and it didn’t look good. How in the world would it go from sunny and 80s to 50s and raining? And that was during the day! We were not going to let the weather ruin a birthday so, we kept on with the plan.
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Guys! We are downsizing very soon and we would love to see our 5th wheel go to another full-time family. We have customized this rig with a stand up desk for those who work on the road. It is ready for a large family to take it on adventures.
Help us spread the word so that we can find the perfect family for our home!
We have created this video to show more of the inside and everything it has to offer. Please watch it and share with your family and friends. Let's find Rocksteady (our rig) a new family!
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Jonathan Longnecker / August 04, 2016
Ashley Longnecker / July 27, 2016
We’re Jonathan & Ashley Longnecker. We love weird ideas, great food, travel, drawing, music, homeschool, tattoos, dreads, woodworking, design and our 4 amazing kids.