The last few weeks have been more than a little interesting. I have spent a lot of time researching content management systems since I first posted on Joomla a few months back. I was having a lot of trouble getting my blog to look and work the way that I wanted it to and I was also having trouble extending Joomla. Something that should have been relatively easy descended into a lot of work.  

What started out as a project to establish a web presence for my family very quickly turned into a project about researching content management systems. All of this coincided with my departure from Earthlink and I decided that this would be a very worthwhile exercise for a number of other reasons.

I’m going to be posting some information on my Joomla findings in a day or two, but I have been very quiet for a while and I wanted to give you a heads up on why I moved to WordPress first.

One of the things I have found about content management systems is how simple it is to backup and recreate the site and copy data around. The fact that everything lives in a database and the fact that the database is easily accessible from SQL means that you can get at the content and move it between your web hosting provider and your internal servers very easily.

The tool that I was using for The Software Gorilla before this was not easy to work with, there was no extensibility in it, and the data was not accessible. It had to go.

During my investigation of other content management systems, I found that each of them had components that helped with writing a blog, but nothing did the job just the way I wanted it. Although I have standardized on one of the content management systems for three other web-sites, I wanted something that could specifically handle blogs.

I had heard a lot of good about WordPress, especially as far as its extensibility is concerned. I set off on a research expedition travelling to a number of web sites that are WordPress based.

WordPress is a content management system specifically designed around blogs. It is ideal for publishing your ideas, getting feedback, having discussions and managing… well… the content of your blog. It provides great stats and it has numerous plugins that help you to extend it. For example, if you want to have a CAPTCHA to block spam responses, there are plugins for that.

It has extensive sets of themes and looks really good when it is set up properly. I’m still experimenting with my theme and I will probably end up building my own theme eventually.

The thing I like most about WordPress is that allows me to focus on writing the stuff that you are reading rather than worrying about the administration and layout of the blog.

The thing that really made me sit up and take notice is that companies like the New York Times, Yahoo and People magazine are all making use of this piece of software to run their blogs. That probably means I can run mine on it pretty safely.

As far as set up is concerned, it is really easy to get going with it and if you would prefer to, you can have WordPress host your blog for you at WordPress.com.

The switchover took me a little while because I needed to get my content from my old system and that was pretty much a manual process.

So far so good. I’m fairly satisfied with the switch and I hope you like it too. Let me know what you think.