Why I have chosen Hugo CMS?
I’ve tried to make a proper human resource management website several times over the years. And almost every time, I’ve ended up with a problem I couldn’t solve. And I was looking for a solution in some other content management system, which of course I couldn’t handle in the end either. And I ended up with Hugo CMS, which is simple and free and handles what other systems come at a decent price.
The first system was Joomla. I guess it’s a great system, but I never managed to make the template in my image and the whole thing was very slow. Today it’s probably better, but it wasn’t for me. I’m not a techie to keep playing with a system for months and tweak everything to my image. So I moved on to the next system.
Next up was Drupal. It’s definitely a cool system, but if anything is really complicated, Drupal gets nominated for the winning line up. It’s a system that can handle just about anything, but you need to hire an expert, which I didn’t want to pay for. So, my search for the perfect CMS continued.
I discovered MODx and I have to say it was a system I could relatively understand. I was even able to create my own template. I was happy for a few years, but then someone hacked my site. And when I cleaned it up, it was all back up in a few days. And there were thousands of pages of clothes on my site with descriptions in Chinese. So I moved on again.
Wordpress was a clear choice, but I left it. Super easy because it has a plugin for practically anything. I have two big buts though. Pages are still kind of extra in the system. If I just want a blog, it’s easy. If I want pages, I run into problems. I never understood Page Builders and didn’t have the patience to learn them. Making a template isn’t easy, but that may be because I didn’t want to invest the time and effort.
And then I have a second reservation. Wordpress is ultimately a system that is expensive to run. Most of the useful plugins are paid for. And it’s 99 euro here, 99 euro there, regularly every year. Also, Wordpress hosting is expensive. And so there was nothing to do but look further… and I found Hugo CMS.
What do I like about Hugo CMS?
- Markdown - if there’s anything super convenient for writing, it’s Markdown. Nothing complicated, you can learn it in a few minutes and it works just about everywhere. Most importantly, there are online editors where I can jot down an idea and come back to it later;
- Files are in directories - how simple, in Wordpress I got lost in the structure in a while, here I just need Explorer or Finder and one quickly knows where which page is; but even this structure is easy to break (but I wouldn’t recommend it);
- Templates - too simple, one quickly understands how to make a basic template, and if I need something extra, with the help I can always figure it out somehow satisfactorily;
- HTML - the output is pure HTML pages and there is nothing faster and safer than clear and clean HTML code, no database, no PHP;
- Cloudflare Pages - excellent and super fast hosting, plus free, which is handy.
