Full Circle: Why I Came Back to WordPress

The 5 or so people that follow this blog have probably noticed that I’ve changed the software I use numerous times. This is because it’s incredibly hard to find something that’s just right. Sure you could write it yourself, but most people aren’t capable of that, and the ones that are typically lack the time to do it on their own.

I started with WordPress because I didn’t know any better. Kudos to their marketing team or whatever, because it was the only thing I knew of that was geared towards blogging. I, like many “bloggers” out there, didn’t even know what I wanted to write about. I just knew that I wanted to get in on this hot piece of blogosphere and that WordPress could get me there. I was mostly satisfied with WordPress’s features, but as time went on I found myself wanting less of what I had and more of what I didn’t.

I started to see some of the issues that people frequently complained about with WordPress. It was slow, it was clunky, and it required a lot of tweaking and plugin installations to fix these issues. To this day, I still need to install a caching plugin in order to prevent WordPress from eating my server. I set out to find something that was a bit more light weight.

The polar opposite of WordPress is ikiwiki, which is an incredibly lightweight wiki software. It works off of git, so you simply need to add files in git and push in order to publish your posts. Pretty awesome. However, I ran into some issues with allowing other people to post comments which made it a pain for me to deal with. What’s the point of blogging if people can’t even comment? Not that a lot of people comment on my posts, but I’d like to give them the option to if they please.

Eventually, I slapped a Drupal instance up and I was on my merry way. Drupal is a rather robust CMS that allows you to configure pretty much everything through the web interface. Things like menus, forums, and even Facebook plugins were incredibly easy to tack onto my instance. What really sealed the deal for me was that Drupal has caching built in so you’re not forced to use $plugin to manage that for you. Drupal is probably heavier than WordPress (and was certainly overkill for a blog), but it felt lighter. Sometimes that’s what matters.

I really liked Drupal, but something about it seemed off. Posts were incredibly easy to update, but drafts were a lot of effort to manage. I tend to write things and then forget about them for a few days. Without any sort of auto save feature, I was forced to manage all of this myself. Not really a huge deal, but it was inconvenient if I was typing something and my computer or browser crashed (which had happened a few times). I also didn’t like the registration options. Users could register, but there wasn’t really an easy way to prevent spam without coding something myself. It was harder to rely on services like Facebook/Twitter/OpenID for people to leave comments since the plugins that did this were flakey (but easy to install!).

Managing the permissions for registered users became a chore since Drupal offers a plethora of options to choose from. Had there been some decent permissions templates available, I would have been okay I think. Themes were also a bit difficult to create, but I realize that this is also an issue with WordPress to some extent. I consider a major part of the problem to be the fact that I don’t want to devote the time to making really good themes. I can’t really knock any of these systems for my laziness.

So here I am. Back on WordPress. They’ve made numerous improvements since I last used it, so I have a really good feeling this time around. And after manually moving my Drupal database to WordPress, I’m not likely to switch any time soon. It seems the lesson to be learned here is that blogging is best left to software designed for blogging.