Converting To WordPress

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Tonight I took the plunge. After nearly two years of writing and maintaining my own blogging software, I converted over to WordPress, the ubiquitous platform used by, well, pretty much everyone.

My choice to switch was made simple by a number of considerations. First, blogging software, especially of the WordPress variety, has gotten very complex, with a unique set of features and a high level of participation by the community. Second, I have less time now than I used to with which to write and maintain a code base. Third, I have other projects that demand my attention, and there’s a limit to how much investment I want to make in blogging software.

WordPress has come a long way since I first checked it out two years ago. But so have I. I have a greater understanding of PHP, and while the WordPress code is not perfect, I’ve found it to be usable, user-friendly, and easy to get along with. Plugins like WP-Super-Cache make WordPress useful for high traffic sites, and more efficient than hitting the database each and every time a page is loaded.

So welcome to my WordPress blog. Hope you like the change.

Brandon Savage is the author of Mastering Object Oriented PHP and Practical Design Patterns in PHP

Posted on 2/13/2009 at 11:08 pm
Categories: System Architecture
Tags:

Jani Hartikainen (@jhartikainen) wrote at 2/13/2009 11:49 pm:

Ah, so that’s why 10 or so of your old posts re-appeared in your RSS feed =)

Brandon Savage (@brandonsavage) wrote at 2/13/2009 11:54 pm:

Yes that is an unfortunate consequence of migrating the site. I’ve not found a way to prevent the syndication. Hopefully it isn’t too serious an issue.

Les wrote at 2/14/2009 12:17 pm:

Quote “… found it to be usable, user-friendly, and easy to get …”

I would consider otherwise but after reading your blog post I assume you are coming from a non technical, non professional background and that being the case, then I can understand why you should think that WordPress is “user friendly”.

However it is not; there is so much wrong with the software the disadvantages – the many patches – don’t stack up against the advantages – as in free software – but that’s my thoughts on the matter.

We can’t all be a professional now can we? ;)

Brandon Savage (@brandonsavage) wrote at 2/14/2009 5:51 pm:

Les, I’m disappointed that you had to use personal attacks to make your point. I respect your right to disagree with me, so much that I posted your comment, and there was no need to insult me to boot.

I think there are a number of reasons why people don’t use WordPress, and your concerns are valid. In my case, I made a choice to use software that I considered to be “good enough” for what I wanted to accomplish.

If we were to evaluate all software on the number of patches issued we would have to invalidate the benefits of such open source platforms as Firefox and Ubuntu Linux, and even such closed-source platforms as Office and Windows. WordPress has gone to great lengths to make upgrading easy, namely making their Subversion repository readable by the world at large, and I’d dare say it is even easier than upgrading my operating system or an installation of PHP.

Thousands of people have chosen to make WordPress their platform of choice, and hundreds have contributed to the project. That is it’s chief benefit: I can contribute all the code I want while benefiting from the collective genius of others. To me, this makes WordPress not perfect, but a satisfactory work in progress that I can utilize on a daily basis and help make better.

If you believe that contributing to open source, helping find bugs in existing packages, and being willing to live with bugs makes myself or others unprofessional, then so be it. But I think that’s short-sighted.

John Sullivan (@jsinkeywest) wrote at 2/15/2009 11:34 pm:

Hi Brandon
Came across your site from the PHP site, anyway I’m glad people like that jerk Les
don’t come by my site;) I have been blogging for almost a year and looking to get a grip on PHP Perl,well let me just say PHP for now.Anyway I wanted to just say hello and I have used wordpress for 1 year and it’s user friendly both in the front and back.I’m looking to collaborate with someone or even pay to have a site I want to set up for bloggers. I’m going to look around at some older post.If you or any of your buds are interested look me up on my do follow blog and YES not you LES LOL ;) Peace site looks good I got to get back to the less is more set up
Thanks
Stumbled

RaiulBaztepo wrote at 3/28/2009 7:05 pm:

Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language ;)
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo

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