Web Info & Tutorials

I’ve begun the progress of moving to WordPress. The process began by migrating data from my old blog into the WordPress tables. After that I had to create a plugin that would adequately translate my old posts into the new WordPress posts. Now that that is all done I’ve started working on a new design for my site. It’s been about two years since I last refreshed the design so it’s definitely time for a change around here.

WordPress, so far, isn’t difficult to work with per se, but the code is painful to look at. Not that there aren’t good things about WordPress. The following is a list of things I both like and dislike about my new home.

• The code, as I already mentioned, is painful. There’s barely a trace of any kind of coding standards within the core code. Some of it is OOP, while other parts are procedural. To top this off; none of it appears to be documented.
• The plugins and theme engines are fairly well laid out, documented and seamless. Within minutes I had created, activated and started using my own plugin. Very little programming knowledge is needed to get started, which would explain why there are thousands of WordPress plugins.
• The database layout doesn’t use InnoDB, hence no foreign key constraints, nor does some of the field layout make much sense. That being said, it’s not horrible. The most annoying thing I found while migrating my old entries was that WordPress caches comment and post counts for posts and categories. So, despite a post have 3 comments, WordPress would show 0 comments.
• Making WordPress sing with mod_rewrite was a snap.
• Tags aren’t build in. What the hell?
• The administrative part of the site is, quite simply, a work of art. I love it.
• I’m currently using three plugins: the one that translates old joestump.net content into WordPress content, wp-recent-links and Spam Karma 2.2.
• What you are looking at is not the final design.

So why did I convert to WordPress from my home grown code? Well, to put it simply, WordPress has all the bells and whistles that I simply don’t have the time to program. Another issue was that maintaining the old blog was a huge pain and I’m hoping by converting to WordPress it will directly lead to me blogging more frequently.

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