Why WordPress?

After previous attempts at developing my own content management system for Realmofhob.com, I’ve finally returned to WordPress.

Creating a custom CMS is actually pretty easy for the front end, especially when I had taken advantage of disqus to handle the commenting. Read-only content is pretty easy to code up, and a little .htaccess tweaking will even provide friendly URLs. The problem with a custom CMS, is the management end. I never got around to creating anything close to a functional backend, and for the most part I was left with phpMyAdmin to perform blog updates. Hence, no updates at all.

I considered dabbling with Python/Django, but decided to table that experiment until the 1.0 release of Django in September. Not to mention my need to become a bit more familiar with Python itself.

So in the end I decided to come back to my old friend WordPress. The following is why.

I feel that at this time I could be considered a WordPress expert. Even though I haven’t used the system for over a year on any personal blog or site or mine, I have been working with it extensively on both Wallstrip.com and MobLogic.tv. I didn’t just create any old blog on either of these two sites, but instead stretched WordPress to the extremes of its abilities to create a site for daily video consumption, in addition to a standard text-based blog on each site. Thus I felt that I had the ability to use WordPress to create the exact site that I wanted

I also created a few tools and functions while working on Wallstrip.com and MobLogic.tv that I reused on this very site, including my threaded comments and relative date function. At some point I may package each up as a proper plugin and release them to the public.

WordPress itself has evolved and added much desired featured in the various releases since I last used it. WordPress now supports tagging natively, and manages media and attachments in a much more useful way. Though I do think the media and attachment management still requires some fine tuning and some much much needed features, but that is a complaint for another post. The recent update to the “Press This” bookmarklet was the killer feature that tipped the scales in favor of WordPress, as I could now easily posts links and video white offsite during my regular browsing.

I’m at the conceptual stage of developing a large multi-author internet publication, and for easy and speed of development, I’m strongly considering using WordPress as its core, at least at first, and this redesign of my current personal site was almost a test run and experiment for many ideas that i would like to include in this publication.

Lastly, I’ve had this redesign in my mind for a few months now and it was about time I just sat down and did it. WordPress let me create the majority of the theme in one weekend, with another weekend for the fine tuning. I’m highly doubt I would have been able to do this in a CMS I was unfamiliar with, and impossible if I was to develop the CMS myself.