Foojay Podcast #102: Why Foojay Walked Away From WordPress for Static Sites

Six years of WordPress plugin updates, security patches, and slow page loads were enough for me, as I wrote about in The New Foojay.io: Generated by Hugo, Maintained by Java. For Foojay Podcast #102, I talk with Andy Damevin and Holly Cummins, both from the Quarkus team at Red Hat, about that move away from WordPress and various static website generator tools.

What we talked about

• The recurring security vulnerabilities that come with WordPress plugins
• How static site generators compare: Jekyll, Hugo, and the Java/Quarkus-based Roq
• Practical strategies for migrating a large site without losing URLs or content
• When a traditional CMS still is the better choice
• Hosting costs, and managing content through Git instead of a database

What stood out

Static site generation is not a new idea, but doing it with a Java-based tool like Roq shows that Java has a seat at this table too, next to the more established Jekyll and Hugo. For a community site like Foojay, being able to manage content through pull requests instead of a CMS login turned out to be one of the biggest wins.

See Foojay Podcast #102 for all info, shownotes, links, etc.