I have had my personal blog on WordPress (self-hosted) for two years now, and I felt like I wanted an easy CMS with no maintenance so I can just publish my blog posts. Medium seems to be the best of this kind.
Ghost
First I tried Ghost, but it’s such a pain to set it up without a one-click install feature. Actually I did manage to have it run properly, but not forever. I thought this may not suit me, so let me just pass this.
Grav
The second one was Grav, a flat-file CMS. It was easy to set up with the Core + Admin package. The setup was easy, and I mean setup. Then when I got it running, the pain was with customizing how pages look as some themes gave errors to the whole blog. I was saying goodbye.
Pagekit
Came the third one, Pagekit. This one was the one I prefer until I changed my hosting provider, which doesn’t support PHP 5.5.9. Anyway, it worked great on the previous server. Clean design, easy to use, full manual page building. The only thing I thought it was weird was that you have to manage media yourself; it doesn’t automatically organize photos for you like WordPress, instead you have to make a folder and do it on your own.
Medium
I then decided to move to Medium, so I did move. I created a publication in minutes and everything was set up. The migration from WordPress was easy with original publish dates preserved. But the only problem I faced was that WordPress didn’t (and doesn’t) export media files, so I had to re-upload it to Medium myself. Thankfully I didn’t have a lot of posts.
Medium is fast and offers a set of features that are easy to use. The writing is flexible with automatic photo arrangement. What I like the most are clean design and that stories are immersive with full-width photos.
Writers, move your blog to Medium now.
Oh, did a mention you can use a custom URL for your publication on Medium?
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