Why I’m Glad I Stayed with Geeklog

For many years, WordPress has been the obvious choice for a huge number of websites.

Its ecosystem is enormous. There are plugins, themes and integrations for almost everything. It is easy to understand why many people who once used Geeklog eventually moved to WordPress.

I considered that path too.

But today, I am increasingly glad that I stayed with Geeklog.

Some of my Geeklog websites have now been online for 21 years.

That changes the way I look at a CMS.

Twenty-One Years Later, the Sites Are Still Here

When a website survives for more than two decades, priorities change.

You start caring less about trends and more about stability, maintainability and control.

A CMS is no longer just a tool used to publish a few pages.

It becomes infrastructure.

Over the years, Geeklog has given me something that I value more and more: a relatively stable foundation that I can understand, maintain and extend.

Of course, Geeklog has not always moved as quickly as other platforms.

Its ecosystem is smaller.

Some plugins needed modernization.

Some interfaces clearly came from another generation of the web.

But the foundation remained usable.

And that matters.

I Now See Geeklog Differently

Recently, my view of Geeklog has changed again.

I no longer see it simply as a CMS.

I increasingly see it as the foundation of a platform.

Forum, MediaGallery, Maps, Forms, Documents, Store, SEO tools and other plugins can become parts of a coherent ecosystem.

Existing plugins can be modernized.

Old code can be cleaned up.

Interfaces can be improved.

Plugins can share conventions and work together more closely.

New services can then be built on top of that foundation.

This is where things become interesting.

A Smaller Ecosystem Can Be an Advantage

WordPress has thousands of solutions for almost every problem.

That is a major strength.

But it can also mean assembling many independent products, each with its own interface, dependencies, roadmap and sometimes its own commercial model.

Geeklog offers another possibility.

Instead of having hundreds of choices, we can focus on a smaller number of useful components and make them work well together.

For people who want to control their stack, this approach can be very attractive.

The goal is not to reproduce the WordPress ecosystem.

It is to build something smaller, understandable and dependable.

Stability Is Not the Same as Stagnation

Geeklog has often evolved slowly.

In the past, that could easily be seen as a weakness.

Today, I see more nuance.

A stable core can be valuable when the ecosystem around it continues to improve.

The important thing is not to change everything constantly.

It is to modernize what needs modernization without destroying what already works.

That means supporting current PHP versions, improving interfaces, revisiting older plugins, improving interoperability and making development and maintenance easier.

This kind of evolution may be less spectacular than replacing an entire platform every few years.

But for long-lived websites, it can be much more useful.

If You Left Geeklog, Have Another Look

Some people reading this probably used Geeklog years ago.

Maybe you eventually moved to WordPress.

Maybe you simply stopped following the project.

That is understandable.

But I think Geeklog deserves another look.

Not necessarily because you should migrate your current sites back.

Simply because interesting things are happening again.

Plugins are being reviewed and modernized.

New ideas are being explored.

Developers are improving existing components instead of starting from zero.

And the ecosystem has the potential to become more coherent.

Install Geeklog on a test site.

Explore the current plugins.

Look at the GitHub repositories.

Follow what is being developed.

You may be surprised.

And a Word for Tom

It is also worth remembering that Geeklog is still here because people have kept it alive over the years.

Tom deserves a special mention for continuing to maintain and guide the CMS for so long.

Keeping an open-source project alive across many years, PHP generations and changes in the web ecosystem is not a small task.

For those of us who still run Geeklog sites today, that continuity has real value.

So thank you, Tom, for keeping the foundation in place and allowing the rest of us to continue building on it.

I’m Glad I Persisted

After more than two decades, some of my Geeklog sites are still running.

That alone makes me happy that I persisted.

But what excites me most is not the past.

It is what Geeklog could become next.

Not a competitor trying to beat WordPress at its own game.

Something different.

A stable, open and understandable foundation on which we can continue building.

And after 21 years, I am still curious to see how far we can take it.