[GNC] Proposal to Redesign the GnuCash Website with Wordpress

[John Ralls]

> On Jun 12, 2025, at 08:43, Ken Marshall <ktm at rice.edu> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 01:22:32PM +0200, Geert Janssens wrote:
>> Hi Timo,
>> 
>> Thank you for your offer.
>> 
>> I agree with you the project's website is showing its age and can use some love.
>> 
>> I'm maintaining a wordpress site in another context myself. From that experience, I don't 
>> lean towards wordpress any more though.
>> For our needs I'd rather have a revamped site implemented using a static website 
>> generator. So far I only have experimented with Hugo as example, but I know there are 
>> more.
>> 
>> In my experience a CMS like wordpress brings quite a bit of additional maintenance. It's a 
>> huge code base of which we'd only use a small part, but which leave much room for 
>> uncaught bugs.
>> 
>> That is however just my 2 cents as a currently inactive gnucash dev. I'd be interested to 
>> hear what the others think of this.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> Geert
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have to agree with Geert. Wordpress and other heavy-weight CMS carry
> both an additional maintenance burden as well as an additional resource
> toll and site performance impact. Managing the bugs/patching requires a
> lot of trained resources that are typically not availabe to an open
> source product.
> 

I manage a WordPress instance too, https://www.californiaancestors.org <https://www.californiaancestors.org/>. We (the California Genealogical Society) chose WordPress specifically because maintaining the content is *less* technical than other CMSes. We’ve found that mostly to be true. But we also pay a hosting service to provide the infrastructure. GnuCash doesn’t pay a hosting service. www.gnucash.org <http://www.gnucash.org/> is hosted at Linas Vepstas’s house. I’m pretty sure that it would be way too much to ask Linas to provide and maintain a CMS instance, no matter what CMS that might be.

So Timo, thanks for the offer, but no thanks.

One more thing: Please don’t cross-post across the mailing lists. 

Regards,
John Ralls