Why not WordPress?

I’m trying to create a simple content website for a client. It just needs a user-editable homepage slider and a simple image gallery. That’s it.

I really don’t want to use WordPress for this because it seems like overkill for such a small site. I’ve been heavily researching alternatives.

The only one I can find that almost works is October CMS. It’s got an image gallery plugin, and has a slider plugin. However, I’m trying to create a full-screen responsive slider for the homepage, and I can’t seem to hack the plugin to get it to work the way I want it to. It doesn’t respond to being set to 100% height, and doesn’t have classes to hook to in order to change everything. It’s also a little buggy, for example, submitting the component (that’s October for plugins) settings and then saving the page the component is on, and then re-opening the modal the settings are in, will present me with blank settings fields and validation errors for not filling out those fields, even though on refresh they’re filled out.

October CMS is almost close enough, but I can’t seem to get it to work the way I want it to, and now I’m starting to wonder if it would just save time and hassle to just use WordPress and get it over with. I already know what I would use with WordPress to accomplish what I want, but I still feel like it’s overkill.

Maybe it’s time to learn some PHP and code my own solutions. This is why there’s so many damn CMSs out there, but for some reason none of them fit my needs.

Why not WordPress? Like I said, it’s overkill. Way too many features, I have to set up MySQL stuff for it, configuration, some hacks to speed it up, all sorts of fun stuff. I just need something simple that’s user-friendly.

I like that I can set up October CMS with Sqlite, a file-based database. No messing with MySQL and re-learning the necessary commands to create databases, users, and assign privileges every time I need to do something with MySQL because it’s so infrequent. And from what I’ve read, Sqlite is fine for a lot of traffic (potentially) as long as it’s read-only traffic. So a few writes here and there every other week or so won’t slow it down.

Need to find more CMSs.