March 27th, 2005 | No Comments
Moving Over to WordPress
During this recent (and still on-going) re-design, I decided to start looking for a decent Content Management System to replace my self-built scripts that had previously been powering the site’s backend. I had originally thought that by building my own CMS, I would be able to get exactly what I wanted out of the site. So, I had persevered with my hastily assembled set of scripts for adding blog entries and links etc. I had also thought that by building a CMS for myself, I would learn new skills that I could put to use on other projects.
To a certain extent this was true, and I did learn a lot, but I was becoming increasingly frustrated with fixing holes I was finding in my own work, and was also beginning to realise that most of the things that I wanted to do were common to many websites, and that many bloggers were using pre-built tools such as WordPress and Textpattern to achieve exactly the same things that I wished for (e.g. allowing comments, moderating comments, editing posts…). It also occured to me that these tools had armies of people busy developing plugins and extensions for them to increase their functionality and usability in ways that I couldn’t possibly imagine (let alone code) with my own CMS.
I first turned to TextPattern (largely because it was used by some of my favourite bloggers), and was reasonably happy with it. (In fact one of my side projects, AdSearch is still powered by TextPattern). But when I started to redesign The Beat, I decided to give WordPress a try, and realised that PHP code was easier to embed into the WordPress templates than in TextPattern. One of the reasons I had wanted to build my own CMS originally was that I thought I would be constrained by the template engine, but having actually tried these out now, I realise that this is not the case. I also believe that these template engines can also easily be put to use in different types of site other than just blogs (as is the case with The Beat) - which will hopefully save on development time in future projects. I found the install of both WordPress and Textpattern to be pretty much a doddle - a basic install of both only takes 15 - 20 minutes, at least in my experience.
One area I feel that WordPress needs to improve is in the link handling - at present there does not seem to be any way of paging the links by category - I have yet to find the code or a plugin to do this, and at the moment don’t fancy trying to code my own. Where I use WordPress’ link management on The Beat, I am left to list links on a single page (albeit broken up by category). Also, unlike with posts, it is not possible to assign a link to several categories, as with sites such as del.icio.us. It is for this reason that I am still using my own back-end for managing links on WV4, but am looking to move this to WordPress as soon as I find the necessary code, which given the amount of coding activity by the WordPress community, shouldn’t be too long.
Another bonus I’ve found from using both WordPress and TextPattern is the ability to edit pages, posts and the CSS through a web browser, without the need for editing tools (Notepad, Dreamweaver…) or having to FTP. What it does mean however is that I often won’t now have a backup of the files stored on my local PC in the event of anything disastrous happening to the web server, so I’m going to have to ensure that files are backed-up regularly in some other way.
WV4 is the online home of Rob Lewis, featuring a blog covering a variety of subjects, mainly web design, CSS and PHP, as well as featuring useful links to other websites.