In the waning months (or, as you could say, the 'ber months) of last year the WordPress world got all up in arms after comments made by the project's head, Matt Mullenweg. One result of this was that Eric and I wanted to look into diversifying our web development skills to other CMS platforms. We were turned on to Statamic as a CMS to look into, and one we hadn't heard of yet.
This was in the midst of also having just sent an RFP response to a then-new client for building a WordPress website. Luckily for us all, when we described the turmoil, they were intrigued by the idea of exploring Statamic with us. But they weren't ready for us to start working on their site quite yet.
So throughout the end of 2024 and early 2025 we rebuilt two personal sites (Eric's and Mary's), and then also rebuilt our agency website, all in Statamic. We needed the learning time anyway, and on top of that, we already knew that there wasn't a future for client-grade websites in Jekyll, which was the tool we had been using for our personal websites before, since about 2018.
When it came time to do the project for our newest client, we could jump right in and managed to fully build out the new website for Auburn Theological Seminary in just over 1 month (another team came up with the design, which would have added time if we'd been responsible for that). We couldn't believe the Git logs that were evidence of the speed at which we could build the website. Night and day in that regard compared to WordPress. But also built on the months of practicing with our own websites. One of the things that makes this faster I think is that you are responsible for all of the frontend, no themes the same way WordPress has. For folks like me, this means building a Statamic website feels much closer to raw HTML than WordPress ever has. You need it, build it. Nothing really stands in your way. That, combined with adopting Tailwind for most of these sites, means almost all of your work is in what appear to be HTML files with some extra programming fluff. Statanmic is PHP, but not in any way like WordPress. You barely need to touch that layer, and when you do it is way more controlled.
That Statamic is built as a Laravel app means we're now at least somewhat well versed in that universe. By no means experts, but we are understanding the lay of that land better. That framework also lends some of the powerful structural advantages to Statamic that WordPress just doesn't have. For example, the core code, as well as add-ons, are ultimately Composer packages. This means we're now better at using that tool. But it also means the code is not at all in the directory that is served to the internet, making for a more secure system. You simply cannot hope to read that which is not served, unlike how WordPress sites are structured. Granted PHP makes that unlikely anyway, but it just isn't even an option here.
Statamic also lets you work with site content entirely in flat files, rather than a database. While extremely large sites can use databases, none we've yet built get near that threshold. This means that everything, software (via Composer and NPM package files), your sites config and theme, and content, all can go into Git. This makes it way easier to move sites around, run sites locally, and in fact Git becomes a near-constant backup service for the sites if desired. Flat files also mean that for me, who likes getting dirty with code, I not only can keep that aspect of Jekyll, but simultaneously can use the control panel of Statamic for a GUI experience.
Last week I turned my attention to this website, having Auburn launched and the Easter holiday behind me. I knew that Jekyll had no future for me, especially when Statamic was such a success both personally and professionally. Less than 24 hours ago I swapped out my live website with a version generated by Statamic, not Jekyll. Yes, you are reading this text on the 5th Statamic website I've been involved in building in about the same amount of time I would have built just 1 to possibly 2 WordPress websites of similar caliber as Auburn needed. While there are some things not yet worked out (mainly dark mode for those of you, like me, that live in that world), it was way better than the old site, and I'm confident I can quickly update it as needed, while Jekyll may no longer be working on my Mac.
Statamic also has a number of methods of serving websites. We're running Auburn much like we run WordPress websites. Staff can log in to edit the site directly, save, and it is published for the world. But that isn't the only way to set things up. Our agency website is the next closest. It (for now) runs Statamic with live PHP, but has the control panel disabled on that live server. Eric and I run sites locally for development, so we use that to edit the Tenseg website, and then use Git to push content over to the live server. Then, you also can, like Jekyll, generate flat HTML files for a site. The rest of our sites are doing that, where again, we only edit locally. This is the most secure, there is absolutely nothing that an attacker could attack. It just doesn't exist. All that is served is flat HTML, CSS, Javascript, and media. These sites can also be served from AWS S3 or similar, rather than traditional web hosts. The flexibility in this side of Statamic is also fabulous.
The fact that we've already begun extending Statamic with our own add-ons, not yet public but used on our sites, is another testament to its flexibility for those of us coming from other PHP-centric web development. But if you need help, another awesome thing about Statamic is that the core team runs a Discord server where you can find help from not just other folks like you, but the core team. That you can actually talk to the founder of Statamic there is such a different world from WordPress.
So, this is a long-winded way of recording for the future that my website has, yet again, changed platforms. But it keeps the best of both worlds, including being just flat HTML.