My recent attempt to write Wordpress plugins failed, but it gave me my first semi-clear view of Wordpress under the hood. I saw big chunks of coding to replace features that didn’t need replacing. The whole system struck me as bloated and patched together.
I will stick with it until the time comes to invest in a pricey blogging system. But now I wonder how someone like me, without PHP expertise or much knowledge of servers and hosting, can guess which system is best.
I started this site on
Serendipity, which is mind-bogglingly awesome in terms of features but had a limited community of plugin developers. I also tried Drupal, which is overwhelming for novices who just want to set up a damn blog and start blogging. I never figured out theming on either, which was one of the reasons I switched to Wordpress. But are they lightweight? Are they secure? I had no idea.
I played with TextPattern and B2Evolution. Again, I couldn’t figure out theming or find plugins for everything. And I had no idea if they were worth learning because, once again, I had no idea if they were lightweight and secure.
Wordpress is not necessarily secure out of the box because some hosts don’t configure permissions the way Wordpress developers apparently assume everyone does. You may not be able to upload without changing folders to 777, and novice users don’t always realize that’s a problem (either ftp your uploads, or find a new host). And Wordpress sure isn’t lightweight when you get Dugg. Until then, it’s a fast-loading, impressive platform - assuming you haven’t innocently installed plugins which dump mountains of garbage into your database, or made any one of 100 newbie mistakes I’ve made that slow it down. But once the traffic comes, the php calls multiply insanely and your blog can’t load. There are workarounds - caching plugins will almost certainly take care of this. And you can recode some of your php calls to be html (like your categories).
Wordpress is extremely full-featured, in the sense that you can practically order a plugin in the forum and find one or get one made in less than a day. Awesome! But that plugin could cause security issues, could kill your server with php calls, etc. You still have to know what you’re doing, or Wordpress can kill you. Fortunately, the community’s so big you can always get help when things go wrong.
That said, what do you use and why? Can you tell us non-programmers something about how to find the right blogging platform for our sites?
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