So I’ve been using WordPress as my blogging platform for a while now. As a matter of fact, this is my 48th post with WP.
I had only heard good things about WordPress before installing it, but how has it worked out?
Starting out
Installing WordPress was a breeze. Download file, extract on server, run install script.
I also installed a premade theme, which was a simple matter of extracting the files to the correct place on the server.
All was nice and easy for me, but the steps could be automated slightly in my opinion. Why did I have to manually figure out where the theme goes on the server, for example?
Plugins
I’ve installed the following plugins:
- Akismet – A great anti-spam tool. Today the total amount of spam it had caught 400 reached, with maybe one or two false positives. I’m more than happy with it; it just works so smoothly.
- All in one SEO pack – gives me better control over what WP puts in meta tags etc. – Haven’t really used it except for the title formatting.
- share this – I’m thinking of replacing this one with those little digg/delicious/etc. icons, but haven’t really found a good plugin (if you know one, do tell!) or time to do it myself, yet at least. The reason I don’t like this one is the “Share this” link, which isn’t very obvious in what it does. The little icons, while taking some more space etc., might be a better option for providing this kind of functionality.
- Simple Tags – Let’s me tag my posts
- Subscribe to comments – This is one I personally like a lot. Sometimes there are discussions and questions in the blog comments, and in my opinion it is slightly tedious to keep track of all possibly interesting comment threads. So this plugin lets readers subscribe to the comments and get an automatic notification of new ones to their email. All blogs should come with this!
- WP-Syntax – You might’ve noticed the color formatting in the code in my posts. Its WP-Syntax’s doing, which is a plugin that integrates the GeSHI syntax highlighter to WordPress.
- Related posts – Displays the box with similar posts
Again, installing plugins is a matter of uploading a file to the correct dir. Why not provide me an upload box in the admin panel instead?
Customization
I wanted to change the theme slightly, which was easy as anything. WP provides a simple textarea for editing the theme files from the admin panel which while not exactly a proper editor, will do its job for small modifications. I also did some small changes to the CSS for the theme, which can be done with the same textarea editor.
I’ve also had to do some mucking with the WordPress code to make some things work like I wanted to. For example, I wanted to display the “read more” links in my posts on the website, but make the posts display full in the RSS feed.
While I could use the more tag to make the read more link show up on the website, it would also make it show up in the RSS feed. I had to modify some of the WP RSS feed files to get it display the full articles in the feeds.
Which leads us to another small issue: Code quality.
WordPress doesn’t have very high quality when it comes to code. Sure, it works, doesn’t have bugs, but it’s slightly confusing and messy. I’ve heard this from many other programmers as well, so I’m not alone with this opinion. While this doesn’t really show up in the quality of the software otherwise, it may be a bit of an annoyance when you want to change some inner workings, like the RSS feed thing.
Usability
WordPress is the best I’ve used when it comes to usability. The user interface is clean and it’s easy to find things. When writing your posts, it also performs automatic saving with Ajax, so even if your PC crashed while you are typing the post, it won’t be lost completely – this was something I kind of missed in My Opera.
Writing posts can also be done purely in HTML which isn’t filtered. This is great for flexibility, such as letting me put JavaScript code in my posts like in the pie menu one. While this might be a problem for someone who doesn’t really understand HTML, it’s a great ease for those who do. Of course, there’s always the visual editor.
My only small gripe is the theme/plugin uploading. It’s a really small thing, considering that I can just simply use wget on my hosting box to get the files, but it still requires me to SSH to it. Might be just slightly nicer if I could upload them from the admin panel.
Conclusion
Perhaps WP is the best PHP-based blogging solution. It’s easy to use, has every possible feature you might need (in my case at least) and does what you want. Sure, the code might be slightly messy, but it isn’t reflected in the product in whole.