When comparing WordPress vs Metalsmith, the Slant community recommends WordPress for most people. In the question“What are the best blogging platforms?” WordPress is ranked 4th while Metalsmith is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose WordPress is:
If you set up WP on your own server, you can change every single aspect of it as you see fit.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Complete control if needed
If you set up WP on your own server, you can change every single aspect of it as you see fit.
Pro Widely used
According to some statistics, WP powers a fifth of the Internet. It means there are resources for everything. Community support, tutorials, extensions and a plethora of customization options.
Pro Self-host & WP-host options
For free WordPress can be hosted by yourself on your own server, or as a subdomain of wordpress.com. You can also pay to use a custom domain with WP hosting.
Pro Open source
Anyone can view the code of WordPress since it's under a libre/open source license.
Pro RSS feeds for everything
Including tags and categories.
Pro Post-level privacy controls
Each post can have a different access level.
Pro Flexible beyond a static site generator
Because metalsmith is at its core focused on transforming directories of files, it can be used for more than just static site generation, and could be used as a build tool, a documentation generator, or any use that requires file transformations.
Pro Designed around plugins
Everything in metalsmith is a plugin, and it is designed to make it easy to write new ones.
Pro Chaining API
Metalsmith uses a chaining API that's consistent and simple to use:
Metalsmith(__dirname)
.use(markdown)
.use(templates('handlebars'))
.build();
Cons
Con A bit of bloat and complexity
WP has grown past being just a blogging platform and as such it's not as lightweight as it used to be. It also considerably more complex due to many more customization options compared to other solutions.
Con Dated
The code is a mess, uses dated conventions, and relies on dated technology.
Con Small community
The Metalsmith community is still fairly small compared to the more popular options. This results in a lack of learning resources and difficulty finding support from experienced users. However, a slack group has recently been started.
Con Not client enabled API chaining
According to the spec on API chaining, the API request/response need to associate an API object to an corresponding controller/action/uri to be able to validate and handle the request/response and the datasets.
Without that, the consuming client service cannot properly validate or relate the datasets from one to the other. Links have no relational value and the api object creates the relationship between the datasets while maintaining an api/dataset relationship with the corresponding controller/action/uri
As such, the current methodology supported would not be able to be called by the client not supported by the client in a RESTFUL manner