Can I vibecode WordPress?

KINDA · weekend project

price $4/moyou'd save $48/yrbuild time a weekendcategory 🧱 website buildersreplaced by 0 people

The thing people actually use WordPress for on a personal site, write posts, upload images, publish, have an RSS feed, is a weekend build and always has been. An agent can hand you a SQLite-backed CMS with a markdown editor, media uploads, drafts, tags, and a sitemap in one sitting, and it will be faster and less hackable than the real thing. What you cannot one-shot is the other 90 percent of WordPress: 60,000 plugins, WooCommerce, Yoast, Elementor, the block editor, and the fact that any freelancer on earth can pick up your site. Also worth noting that core WordPress is already free and self-hostable, so the honest question is whether you want to maintain your own CMS instead of someone else's. If your site has a contact form, a store, or a client who needs to log in, stop reading and just install WordPress.

the prompt

Build a self-hosted personal CMS for a single author. Empty folder, no cloud services, no telemetry, no accounts beyond one local admin.

Stack, non-negotiable:
- Node 22 with TypeScript, Fastify for the server
- SQLite via better-sqlite3, single file at ./data/cms.db, schema created on first boot
- Server-rendered HTML with Eta templates, no client framework
- Plain CSS in one stylesheet, readable typography, dark mode via prefers-color-scheme
- markdown-it for rendering, with a syntax highlight pass and HTML sanitization on output

Features in scope:
- Posts and standalone pages: title, slug, markdown body, excerpt, tags, status (draft, scheduled, published), publish timestamp
- Admin at /admin behind cookie session auth: one admin user, password hash from ADMIN_PASSWORD_HASH in .env, argon2 or bcrypt
- Admin editor: textarea with live preview pane, save as draft, publish, unpublish, delete with confirm
- Media upload to ./data/uploads, images resized to a max width with sharp, served with long cache headers, insert-into-post button that pastes markdown
- Public routes: home with paginated post list, /posts/:slug, /:pageSlug, /tags/:tag
- /feed.xml RSS 2.0, /sitemap.xml, per-post OpenGraph and Twitter card meta tags
- Full text search over posts using SQLite FTS5
- Scheduled posts appear automatically based on publish timestamp, checked on request, no cron needed
- Import script that reads a folder of markdown files with YAML frontmatter and inserts them, so a WordPress export converted to markdown can be loaded
- npm run backup that copies the db and uploads into a timestamped tarball

Explicitly out of scope: plugins, themes, comments, multi-user roles, multisite, e-commerce, a block editor, and any hosted API.

Secrets in .env with a committed .env.example. Ship a README with setup, the password hash generator command, and how to run it behind Caddy with TLS. Include a seed script with three sample posts and a page so the site is not empty on first run.

$ open in your agent (prompt prefilled, you press enter) or copy it raw · this prompt is generated from the build plan · improve it via PR

why people still pay

Almost nobody pays for WordPress the software. They pay for managed hosting so the site stays up and patched, for the three or four plugins that quietly run their business, and for the person who knows how to fix it when the theme update explodes. A personal CMS you built yourself removes the hosting bill and adds an on-call rotation of one. That trade is fine for a blog and terrible for anything that takes money.

what you lose

xThe plugin ecosystem: SEO, forms, caching, memberships, analytics, backups, all one click away in WordPress and all your problem in the DIY build

xWooCommerce and anything resembling commerce

xGutenberg block editing and the visual page builders non-technical people actually like

xA theme marketplace, so your site looks like whatever the agent felt like that day

xAny hope of handing the site to a developer who already knows the stack

xSecurity updates and managed hosting done by someone who is not you

prior art · use these instead of building, if you'd rather

Nothing worth pointing at. That's why the prompt exists.

share on X ↗"I just replaced WordPress ($4/mo) with one prompt"