You may have spotted that I am a keen fan of Wordpress. It is a fantastic “out of the box” blogging tool, and far outclasses the silly bits of perl and php scripting that I was using before. Its support for many blogging protocols and tools taught me loads that I didn’t know, such as pingbacks, trackbacks, XMLRPC, RSS, ATOM and so on. The important thing is, the typical user doesn’t have to know anything about them, doesn’t even need to know they exist within Wordpress and it all works, seamlessly.
A new Wordpress user of a very popular blog said to me “I don’t know how it happened, but it must advertise itself somehow, because I was getting hits almost as soon as I had written something”. So, I told him about server pings, Ping-O-Matic and Wordpresses built in support.
So new blog users, with Wordpress, are instantly immersed into a world where everything just works – magic.
On the other hand, I was helping someone set up a new site which is going to be a typical portal with news articles, stories, blog syndication and aggregation, forums, an information repositary and some custom tweaks particular to that site. With plugins such as bbPress, dwBliki, or easily themeable complementry software such as PunBB and DokuWiki then Wordpress could do it.
We started trying to build the site around Wordpress and these extra bits. There the weakness of Wordpress shows. But, it’s a blog, not a Content Management System (CMS). Wordpress is so powerful it treads into CMS waters, but thats not whats its really for.
My later hunting led me to Drupal which is a lightweight, clever CMS system with lots of pluggablity and a thriving community. Nothing is anywhere near as polished as WordPress, but the way things slot together is much more in keeping of what we were trying to do. There is even a migration tool that does an excellent job of taking over the content. Now, I had a choice – hammering together bits and bobs and learning loads of php at the same time, or living with rough edges and perhaps polishing them up a little (and learning a little php).
We went to Drupal, and are learning how rough those edges can be, but still making much better progress at pulling the site together than we were with WordPress. Oh, and I seriously recommend Bad Behaviour for spam comment control. It works out of the box for Wordpress, and was easily “wedged” into Drupal.
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