Moving to WordPress | Comments (21)
Posted in Muffin Research Labs on 21st February 2006, 5:05 pm by Stuart
Not so long ago I posted that I would be moving to TextPattern from my custom-made blogging system. As a result of that post there were a few interesting comments suggesting I take a look at all of the possibilities before I jumped into moving across to TextPattern. After some deeper consideration on which blogging tool would suit my needs, I have now started to move everything over to WordPress. The move is currently in progress and I hope that this will be the last post from my old system. Building the backend to this blog was great fun but now I need to spend more time writing quality content and developing this site.
As a result of the move expect this site to be a little quiet for the next week or two as I start to get the new WordPress equipped version on the road. At the same time as moving content across I will take the opportunity to make a few tweaks here and there and hopefully get everything sorted before SXSWi with some time to spare!
W00t. Glad your gonna make it to the dark side
Welcome to our world! I began with Blogger and later made the transition towards Wordpress and I’ve never been happier. Looking forward to end result.
Yeah, the dark side. I like Textpattern more, but that?s me.
Welcome to Spam City. Back to Textpattern from WordPress for me, the spam is killing me.
@Zach and G.Lindqvist: Lol, The dark side indeed!
@Sam: I’m not too worried about spam, though I’m well aware moving to WordPress will make my site more of a target.
I will be implementing some of my own measures as well as some level of moderation and that should keep a lid on the spam. You can never stop manually entered spam except through moderation but the automated bot spam should be easily blocked.
I think this is a good choice Stu. I started developing my own blog system but quickly realised the hassle was just not worth it.
WordPress has proven to be very powerful and flexible, even for my relatively small requirements. I’ve utilised quite a few features and plugins within the blog itself and ported into the rest of the site.
Haven’t had many issues with spam, but then it’s not a particularly popular or publised site.
Good luck with the migration!
Nice gravatar, Andy.
Is that the Dead Rat (Rentokil’s own Linux Dist.) logo?
It is indeed, crafted by Nick. Was too lazy to come up with a decent avatar for myself and that was sitting there waiting
@Tim and Andy: What’s this? Hijack my comments to talk about gravatars, honestly!
Hi. Just curious what you have outgrown on your old system? I have built a few blogging systems myself and am wondering if I have overlooked some obvious scalability issues?
@Andrew: The main issue for me was having the time to develop the blogging system further. The goals of moving to WordPress were to be able to move to a tried and tested solution which will then free up more time for me to spend on more interesting projects.
Scalability was not such an issue for me because from the outset I used a full caching mechanism so that every visit to the site wouldn’t use much in the way of database/server resources. This comes in very handy when you suddenly get a peak in the amount of visitors you are getting.
Fortunately in WordPress there is the wp-cache plugin which is perfect for my needs in this area.
"The goals of moving to WordPress were to be able to move to a tried and tested solution which will then free up more time for me to spend on more interesting projects."
My thoughts as well. I had hand-rolled a custom CMS for another site that I was running for a long while until I realised that I was spending so much time coding the boring stuff that it was negatively impacting the experience and thus, the time that I had for actually producing content and designing.
"Welcome to Spam City. Back to Textpattern from WordPress for me, the spam is killing me."
The Bad Behaviour plugin and a decent moderation strategy means that spam barely registers as a concern.
BTW, Stuart, feel free to drop me a shout if you need any help with the move over to WP.
@Phu: Will do. So far it’s all going well with just the Archives stuff giving me a bit of grief. I hope to have it all wrapped up by the end of next weekend if possible.
> "13. On 27th February 2006 at 11:05 am Phu said:"
Imposter! I’m the only Phu! …though I guess I should be flattered you like my name so much;)
@Phu: LOL my mistake, consider it corrected.
Looks like we’re back
Yes Zach, back and with WordPress onboard. Just running through some final checks
.
Mmm…Wordpress is super easy to install and use, but from the point of view of a developer I find it’s architecture a mess and that worries me in terms of flexibility. I use it on my own site but am working on a custom solution that -I hope- will make me happier. Maybe you could share a bit more on how you implemented yours?
Interesting thoughts there Ismael. WordPress is isn’t perfect but for what I wanted to do it’s the right tool for the job. I think if I was going to create my own blogging system again I would first think about which language to write it in before worrying about how to write it.
I am really looking forward to trying out Ruby on Rails because as I programmer I like the sound of it’s more rigid structure. I am also tempted to look at Django and make a comparison of the two. There is something I am beginning to hate about PHP in how it lets you get away with so much that it’s almost encouraging you to write bad code!
In any case now that I am using WordPress I will probably have the time to look into Ruby and Django!
@Stewart & Sam: If you’re finding spam a problem, maybe you should try an excellent plugin called Spam Karma2, by Dr. Dave. This has proved invaluable on some of my sites. Although my main blog uses Textpattern, I will be migrating it over to WP in the near future.
Hope this helps.
Hi Muff, wordpress is well for blogging, but textpattern is nice for particular articles sites. you can use own Design for each side.