Wordpress Smordpress, I’m a Hubspot Fan

Before I even get into explaining the wonders of my favorite CMS platform, yes, I know my website is on Wordpress. Unfortunately the one big downside to Hubspot is the price. The Hubspot platform is geared towards businesses that require the marketing power Hubspot provides instead of the single person just running a small blog. I started working in Hubspot around 8 years ago and have continued to look for work with the platform due to how enjoyable it is. SO this post is about why I prefer developing on Hubspot as opposed to being my go-to option for a project.

All-In-One Solution

What absolutely drives me crazy about Wordpress is how destitute it is on a fresh install. Then you add a multitude of plugins and throw a bunch of code into your functions.php file. All so you can create a website that a client can use somewhat sufficiently for their marketing needs. You can kind of end up with a bit of a mess back-end wise.

Hubspot, however, gifts you with just about everything you could possibly ever need for getting a website up and running. They even support SVG files! In a Hubspot portal you can create redirects, build forms, and optimize for SEO right out of the box. Your portal even comes with it’s own hosting and free SSL. Here are some of the features Hubspot provides that I enjoy most as a developer:

Content Staging

This tool is quite handy when redesigning a website or making any other big changes to existing pages. It lets you copy published pages into a siloed staging area where you can edit and update without your users seeing any downtime on their side. When you’re ready to push your changes live it’s as easy as a click of a button.

Custom Modules

A blessing, a gift, a paradise where I spend the majority of my time. This feature is relatively new and continues to be modified based on feedback from the community. Even when it first came out though it became my favorite addition to the design manager. They’re basically the plugins of Hubspot. Only you build directly in the portal and are immediately able to add it to your templates. All this without the hassle of having to add advanced custom fields and create files specifically to make it usable on the platform.

HubDB

Want to create a listing of resources but loathe the idea of having to create a custom post type and build a post for each resource? Same. That’s why Hubspot’s HubDB (Hubspot Database) is my go-to for any such page. Create a table, set up your columns, and then you can put all your content in one place. Then just make a module to pull in the content exactly how you want it to look instead of mulling over whether you should suffer trying to make a plugin do what you want or code another PHP page. The best part? You can create a dynamic template, that on publish of the listing page, will automatically create a single page for each one of your resources.

Easier to Navigate

I always become frustrated in Wordpress looking for whatever I’m looking for. Every plugin you add can possibly change the position of everything in your menu. Settings for some plugins and themes can turn out to be in multiple places. I constantly find myself saying to myself “That’s not where I thought that was…”

Since there’s no addition of plugins in Hubspot the menu always stays the same (except for that one instance when they did a big, beautiful update to it). Settings for anything and everything are all in one location. Then when creating your templates and modules you have all the power with creating folders and files and organizing them how you wish. Even premade themes and modules are able to be renamed with a very low possibility of completely breaking something.

HubL (HubSpot Markup Language)

I learned PHP back in college, and it was fun while it lasted. When I got into Hubspot and their syntax HubL I switched gears big time. I felt it was quite easy to learn and build complex templates with.  Though that’s just my personal experience with it. It’s simple and the documentation is a bit lacking, but I learn new ways of building with it every day.

I could continue to wax poetic about the many features that make Hubspot an enjoyable platform to code on, but the above is what really pulls me in. It’s all-in-one out of the box platform that makes building and publishing websites a sinch, a database to save time on large content listings, easy navigation of the portal, and a markup language that just resonates with me. If you haven’t yet, I hope you give a Hubspot a try.