I just rebooted everything

This is the great thing with WP: you can do anything, there is a plugin for every feature you desire.

But there is a tradeoff. As WP is developing really fast, plugins needs to be updated all the time. Updates are expensive, and only premium plugin manufacturers can afford to do constant updates. Using a set of premium plugins can be really expensive.

This would be okay if those plugins would fit together perfectly and would deliver the exact features I need. However during the years I reliazed, that those plugins wont fit together perfectly. They are like tetris blocks (I recently learned they are called tetrominos), they might not be filling all the gaps, and if you keep accumulating them, they will start causing trouble. Like the tetris blocks.

Another annoying thing are the notifications. Once you install a plugin, it will not let you go. It will ask you for feedback, rating, upgrade almost every single week. If you have 10 plugins, your dashboard will look like a message board.

And lastly my biggest issue with Wordpress: all the side effects of it's popularity. 43% of all websites are running on Wordpress. Not Blogs. Websites. It also means, if you are a very very bad person, who loves to spam people, it's enough to create a hack or spamming tool for wordpress. I installed akismet, captcha, re-captcha pretty early. I changed my login path, hid my plugins, WP version. I installed advanced wordpress security, and wordfence. I installed comment guard, registration guard, user guard. I really managed to piss off some people at a company called Decapcha, and they decided to target me on the daily basis. It's a company that specializes on solving captchas to spread their bitcoin spam.

Thanks to all the spam registrations and plugins in action my wordpress database started to bloat. In order to manage that, I had to add more plugins, that clean and optimize. And a caching plugin of course.

I felt I'm sinking deeper and deeper into the mud. I spent hours every week trying to maintain my setup, and instead of writing posts I've been cleaning, and upgrading, optimizing, educating myself how to counter the workaround the spammers used on countering my last workaround.

Once the number of fake registrations reached over 2000 / week, I decided to give up on Wordpress. Its been almost 10 years, and I figured it's time to see other software.

By now it should be clear, I'm not a Wordpress person. I'm a Mautic guy.

At Friendly we created some really cool stuff with Mautic. We have webshop based on Mautic, event platform, and other cool things. I know Mautic - why don't I build my membership site with Mautic?

I pulled an open source CMS, that consists of 10 files only. All it ccould do is secure login, signup and displaying posts.

I modified to code to have different categories and page types. I hooked up the user management to Mautic, every registered person is a contact in Mautic. Using custom fields I also added a dynamic content logic, so you don't see stuff what is not relevant to you, or don't have permission to see it. Just one example: you won't see a newsletter subscription box, if you already signed up.

I also added a commenting system. It is built in a way, that the best comments can be featured as expert answers, and will be part of the article itself. This approach is based on the saying 'none of us is as smart as all of us'.

The old comments are unfortunatly lost. I couldn't find a way to keep them. You also need to re-register. I deleted all the registrations. I'm sorry for the trouble.

I migrated all the content, that is still relevant at the age of Mautic 5. My Mautic 4 tutorial is free now, I created a simple page to display all the videos. It does what it supposed to, nothing fancy.

For the Mautic 5/6/7 version I might create a more fancy approach, we will see. Now I finally have time to complete those videos. I also have to redo the MJML mastery course.

All the forms are Mautic forms, but I didn't want to use a usual captcha. Not because they are not amazing, but because captchas are targeted by very bad people. I rather coded my own simple and fun captcha, that works entirely differently from other solutions. I'm hoping that noone will be interested in 'cracking' it. I'll keep you updated how it's going.

The Emails are template emails, triggered from Mautic directly, which helps to keep the design the same across the website.

The page is loading lighning fast, Google Analytics can't praise me enough. The server load is 5% from Wordpresses server load. And I don't even need to use a caching plugin.

Thank you so much for reading this, and I hope this platform will be holding up, and I can keep creating some amazing content for the years to come.

Feel free to comment :)