Switched To WordPress

I’ve been a strong proponent of WordPress for a long time, but only recently has this tool matured and gone really mainstream in the web development world. Not so long ago when a client needs a blog, WordPress was the tool of choice. Now it’s a whole new ball game.

WordPress is a CMS.

Aside from the massive collection of plugins and bolt-ons available, some of them really well done, the WordPress documentation has evolved along with the tool. Now, any decent developer can roll out custom plugins that do exactly what is needed and do it really well. Not only can you deliver great functionality, you can deliver it in a really slick way. If Web 2.0 is set upon us with no looking back, WP as a CMS is Web 2.5.

When I started blogging in 2002 most of tools were green. You could really tell too. While it wasn’t a trivial exercise building something lightweight that could post articles and images – and not a nightmare to maintain as PHP gre by leaps and bounds – it sure beat installing some of the archaic, bug-ridden prefabs available back then. So I built my own.  Not to say that was without its problems either.

In the last 12 months WordPress grew up in a big way. So much so that I converted the front end of my sports blog to WordPress and imported 6 years of data, all in one day. it left a gaping hole in the backend however. What came next was astonishing. Using the WordPress documentation and some terrific “hello word” examples, I was able to convert the vast majority of my backend functionality to WP admin and widget functions. Uploading schedules and having them parsed out, editing the schedules, displaying the next few games in a widget. It happened fast. What’s more, WP recently converted to automatic upgrades. I can now keep myblog software completely up to date without touching a lick of code and not have to rewrite huge swaths of code to keep my backend current with the front end.

Presto.

So if i was such a huge advocate of WordPress, what took me so long?

Well, it wasn’t for lack of effort. I’ve tried a few times to change over but was met with some eratic behaviour I just couldn’t cope with. Like I said, it’s only been the last little bit that WordPress has really come of age. Stability is no longer an issue, upgrades are now a complete snap, and the plugins directory has grown exponentially. A lot of what I would want to do with WordPress just wasn’t around or very stable, not even a year ago.

Hats off to the WordPress Team!