I could go through the effort of coding my own front page software. But why re-invent the wheel? Always a serious consideration. Coding today is less and less about writing things from scratch and more about building solutions from existing products. It’s the connections between things that are the meat of the final product it seems.
I went through the same thought process, and you know what I decided. There might be educational value in coding your own system, but unless you require features that aren’t supplied by and can’t easily be hacked into an existing open source solution it’s hard to justify the effort of coding one up from scratch.
I like wordpress. It’s not as flexible or powerful as some solutions, but it’s very good at what it does. It’s perfect for my needs, and it might be perfect for yours, too.