Bit of a different post today – a few people have asked what this site actually runs on, since I mentioned in a forum thread that I built it myself rather than paying someone. Nothing fancy, it’s WordPress, but a few plugins are doing the actual work so I thought I’d write up what’s under the hood in case it’s useful to anyone else setting up a hobby blog.
Elementor – built the whole layout with this. I am not a designer and the drag-and-drop approach meant I could actually get something that looks half decent without learning CSS properly. Would recommend for anyone in the same boat.
Yoast SEO – mostly so Google can actually find the place. Doubt this blog is ever going to be competing for search traffic against the big restoration sites, but the readability and meta description prompts are handy even if you don’t care much about rankings.
Contact Form 7 – runs the contact page. Gets me maybe one email a fortnight, usually someone asking where I sourced a part, occasionally someone trying to sell me web design services, which is a bit ironic given the whole site is built on plugins.
WP Super Cache – honestly not sure I even need this given the traffic levels, but the hosting was cheap and I’d rather not find out the hard way that it can’t cope if a post ever does the rounds on the forum.
Classic Editor – I know, I know. Never got on with the block editor, still write everything the old way. Not changing now.
That’s the lot. Nothing exotic, just the standard hobbyist toolkit. Back to the actual restorations next post.