Submitted by Bryan on

"Top-flight bloggers are increasingly moving to WordPress, Automattic Productions' no-cost, open-source blogging software. Unlike the basic blogging tools found in Blogger, Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces, and Yahoo 360, WordPress offers tons of plug-ins and widgets for customizing your blog. One of my favorite WordPress features is its spam filter, which weeds out spam posted as comments. You can also make your blog private, allowing only the people you specify to read and comment on your postings."

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Pros and Cons

Deane's picture
We've been doing a lot of work with WordPress lately. The addition of "Pages" makes it a handy little CMS for a lot of things -- it transcends the blog quite easily. We have a half-dozen commercial sites out there based on it. We just released the Federated Media Holiday Gadget Guide on WordPress. It got linked to from Boing Boing and Make on consecutive days, so we had performance issues until we plugged in WP-Cache. The plugin system makes it gut-wrenchingly simple to write plugins to do about whatever you want it to do. However, it needs to be said that the codebase behind WordPress is fairly wretched, and I think everyone knows it. There's absolutely no consistency at all. Joseph Scott spoke out about this last year (and we backed him up on it), but he also made the other important point you can't ignore about WordPress:
So why am I dragging through all of this again? Because despite its rather hideous under belly, WordPress is a successful project with a growing user base. It works, it looks fairly nice and is reasonably simple to install and upgrade. I suspect there is a lesson to be learned here. You can get away with making some aspects of your software rather unpolished, as long as your get the important parts right.

Wordpress

Bryan's picture

I've never had a Wordpress site that had enough traffic to look into the WP-Cache module. It's nice to hear that the plug-in works for you. For the most part I, use eAccelerator on my server to cache the PHP scripts (different approach than WP-Cache creating "static" pages). None of these caching tweaks are difficult to do so I'm surprised more hosting companies don't provide it by "default".

I think what I find attractive about Wordpress is it reminds me of a model airplane kit. You have all these pieces to put together and somehow in the end it all comes together with little fuss. I've never really hit a dead-end with Wordpress. Then again, I've only used it for personal blogs and have never ventured into using it for something more difficult.

By the way Dean, I think you wanted a .net and not a .com in your Federated Media Holiday Gadget Guide so I took the liberty of editing the link in your post. If I'm in error, let me know and I'll change it back!

-Bryan