In February, I made the decision to move back to WordPress after over two years of using my own blog system / Habari. It was a combination of lack of time to keep things secure (compared to WordPress which has single-click upgrade) and the need to have somewhere I could quickly “just write” without juggling maintenance + toddler.
So anyway, follow-up. How do I feel about it now? Great decision, looking back. Don’t get me wrong, I miss Habari. It was quirky, fast and simple; a well-coded system. The path which WordPress is taking though is fascinating. It would be no exaggeration to say that WordPress stuff has formed the bulk of my work for clients this year, and I have had the opportunity to learn/try out so many awesome things.
One project I’m currently bringing to completion is the migration of an existing e-commerce store to a WordPress backend, using custom post types to power the product section and custom taxonomies to tag/categorise products. This tagging, and the power of WordPress’ built-in queries/functions, has allowed me to create a massive bespoke faceted navigation (think Amazon where you drill down the options on the side … Shoes > Size 7 > Brown > etc) in just a few hundred lines of code.
How is this related to my blog? Well, I’m excited by it, and I don’t get excited by code that often any more. :P I can’t wait until the project is live and I have the time to share some of the neat stuff I’ve written / what WP can do & improve THIS site too. Watch this space…
22 Dec at 2:23 pm
At the moment, I love WordPress, and it’s definitely the best CMS out of the few that I’ve tried. However, there are people who complain that it’s a very bloated system. Personally, I don’t use a lot of the new features that it has because my blog is just a simple wall-of-text blog for the most part. Do you have any comment on that, out of curiosity?
24 Dec at 4:30 pm
I have been thinking about moving away from wordpress, but I don’t think I ever will. WordPress is just so easy to use in so many ways, and it has a plugin for pretty much everything you could ever want. The fact that it is so popular also means there’s a lot of online help and resources for it too. I do find it a little bloated though, and I don’t really like the look of the dashboard/admin interface compared to habari. I just have a simple blog, so I don’t really use most of what wordpress offers and find it distracting. In that way I wish there were something akin to a “light” version of wordpress. Or rather, I wish Habari had just a few more plugins and themes! :P
27 Dec at 1:26 am
I’ve debated moving away from WordPress myself, perhaps to Habari…but I am simply too lazy to learn another system. Plus, I can probably install WordPress blindfolded since I’ve done it at least a half dozen times in the past year. :P It is nice to hear that you are excited about code, or a piece of code. It sounds like it will be very helpful…although I am not sure how the integration will work. :)