WordPress
Friday, August 28th, 2009
As an ASP.Net developer, my web servers run IIS. Until recently, that has meant that I have been limited to using ASP.Net apps for custom blogs, CMS software, etc. Now, with the advent of Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer, the choices have expanded to include several PHP/MySql options including WordPress. I’ll save discussion of the Web Platform Installer for another post, but suffice to say, it’s wonderful to have the option of running something like WordPress or Drupal locally in an IIS server.
I’ve chosen to use WordPress as my blogging platform. I’ve used BlogEngine in the past and have a couple of clients using it regularly and it really is pretty excellent, but it can’t compare in terms of user experience, available plug-ins, and community to WordPress. The one thing that might make me think twice is the ability to customize the core code. Since I work in ASP.Net and not PHP, it would be much easier for me to add custom functionality to something like BlogEngine. However, the fact is, there are so many available plug-ins and widgets for WordPress that I don’t foresee the need to do any custom programming.
The entire interface for WordPress is very user-friendly. I’ve had little or no difficulty finding my way around the back-end, installing plug-ins and juggling widgets in my sidebar. There is a huge amount of well-written documentation, so searching for and finding answers to common questions is a breeze.
Creating a custom theme is actually a little trickier in WordPress than some of the other blog packages, but it is fairly straight forward once you get a hold on which file is which. The system makes it easy to produce a theme that is W3C standards-compliant, and accessible.
I think that a lot of people make the mistake of trying to bend WordPress into a full content management system (CMS). It’s not designed to be a CMS, but for a simple web site, depending on what features you need, it can suffice very well. It allows you to create static pages and create a menu for them within your theme as well as in the sidebar via a widget.
The text editor is very easy to use and produces lightweight standards-compliant code- no <span style="font-style: italic;"></span>" where simple <em></em>> tags will do! Uploading and managing images and video is a breeze.
All in all, I’m very happy with WordPress. I’ve hardly scratched the surface of what is available within the WordPress community in terms of information and plug-ins. It may well be that as I learn more, I’ll find more that I don’t like, but so far, it’s all good.
