My Technology Blog

Wordpress Review

In getting up to speed on web server software, and CMS software, I ended up starting with the most full featured, and then worked down to the more specialized software. As you can see in the background below, my original intent was to find a one solution fits all package, but I am starting to come to the conclusion that multiple small specialized packages are better than one large package.

Wordpress is one of these specialized packages, and it is focused on one thing, and that is creating Blogs. All of the extensions, themes and plugins are also focused on Blogs. It is also the reason why I selected Wordpress for this website, which is only going to be a Blog. Compared to the work involved in getting up to speed on Zope, Plone, and Drupal, Wordpress was a breeze.

The one thing that I do not like is the way things are configured in Wordpress via the web interface. For example, when I selcted the option to create pretty URLs for this site, wordpress prompted for a .htaccess file in the main directory with write access. It is not a big deal to work around it, since you don’t really want ot use a .htaccess anyway, and instead modify the Apache config files directly on the server via SSH. It would be nice if there was more information about how to modify things like this on the server, as opposed to using Wordpress to do it.

Pros:

• Typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation.
• Great for Blogs.
• Very user friendly.

Cons:

• Most things are intended to be modified via the web interface in Wordpress (this could be a pro for most people).

Background

I have been playing around with different web server software solutions for the past year and a half, and using these packages to create different types of web sites. I have been working with a few people that are trying to do serious work, but it is mostly a hobby. I have not previously invested a large amount of time in any of these solutions, which allows me to be more unbiased, and I am looking at it from from a typical users point of view.

Initially when I started out, I really wanted to pick one very powerful CMS, and then use it for every web site. If there is one thing that I have learned through this whole exercise, is that this is clearly not the way to go. I will get into some of the reasons in a later postings, but a good analogy to why this is not a good idea, would be building an aircraft carrier to go water skiing. It might be possible, and you could do lots of other things too, but it is not very practical.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 10:48 pm and is filed under CMS, Web Server Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.