Should I use wordpress.org?
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Dear Forum,
I need some help in answering the above question “Should I use wordpress.org?”
I have had no problems with wordpress.com
I have webspace, a domain name and a homepage I want to keep for other purposes, but have 100Mb free.
I saw a plugin I liked hypothes.is, and wanted to install it for my blog. I think I can’t. This is what made me think of wordprss.org.
Can anyone me a URL for a discussion about this? Or if you have time enter into dialogue?
Hope you are keeping well,
All the Best,
BillZ
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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The .com-vs-.org debate is a big question a lot of WordPress users have! Here’s WordPress’s official post on the subject, and here’s another great article that really breaks down the pros and cons of each.
The best metaphor I’ve heard – I don’t remember where I read it, exactly, but I think it was somewhere in the WordPress blog – is that choosing between .com and .org is like choosing whether to rent or to buy a house.
With WordPress.com, you’re renting, which takes a TON of pressure off – your landlord (in this case, WordPress) handles all the day-to-day maintenance, deals with the utility people, handles the paperwork, and all that other detailed stuff so you don’t have to. All you need to do is sign up, move in, and put in your furniture the way you like it. BUT, you also have less freedom when you’re renting. In an apartment, you can choose which paintings to hang on the wall, but you can’t choose to just tear the wall down and make an open floor plan instead. With a WordPress.com site, you can choose which theme you like and make some minor adjustments to make it your own, but as you discovered, there are some plugins that you can’t install because they mess with the overall framework of the site in a way that WordPress.com isn’t equipped to deal with.
With WordPress.org, it’s like you own the house outright. It’s YOUR house, and you can do whatever you want to it – tear all the walls down, paint every shingle a different color of the rainbow, keep pigs in your backyard, whatever makes you happy. But if something breaks, it’s up to you to fix it, or to go out on your own to find somebody who can – usually for a fee – and you’re responsible for doing all of the day-to-day upkeep or finding and dealing directly with the people you’ve hired for that purpose.
It’s a question of risk-vs-reward and investment-vs-payoff. WordPress.org is a bigger risk, more mess, and requires more time and effort, but is also much more liberating and customizable to how YOU want it.
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Acmetoaster,
Thanks a lot for this, it is good starting point and I will follow the links.
I understand the analogy. It is the details that will sway me, and I need to look at them. I rent my own house and prefer to let .com do the work if they can do all the work I want.
That’s why I need to investigate.
Hope you are keeping well,
All the Best,
BillZ
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