Marcus Cavanaugh

Wordpress: Not so Bad After All

I wandered back and forth through the valley of blog time-sink darkness while the siren songs of Django, Pylons, ExpressionEngine, TextPattern, and Tumblr tempted my weary soul. “Install me,” they swooned. “I’ll fill your blog with unimaginable goodness.” Torn apart, I slinked back to my Wordpress install to regroup…

It all started when I wanted to redesign my site to be more easily readable, unique, and extendable. (These things always seem to start with a redesign, don’t they?)

Wordpress users tend to create blogs with a distinct (read: monotonous) visual style. Most users don’t change the default template, and those who do change the template choose ones which still look distinctly Wordpressian. Not to pick on Wordpress, of course — most blog engines have a certain aesthetic. But Wordpress has become very popular, and to many people a typical Wordpress blog looks unoriginal at best.

So I set out to find an engine that I thought would serve my needs: I wanted to aggregate posts from Twitter, images from Flickr, quotes, links, and more. Tumblr was nifty, but limiting. I tried Chyrp, but I was concerned about extensibility. The tumblelog-based sites weren’t cutting it.

I love coding in Pylons, so I began to disillusion myself into thinking that writing my site in Pylons would be a good idea. Django would have worked equally well. I was alarmingly close to starting that project until I realized that I’d be pouring time into a problem that has already been solved well enough for my needs. Jeffrey Zeldman gave a good argument for using a pre-made solution.

Coming back to blog engines, I researched Movable Type, ExpressionEngine, and TextPattern; I installed each of them and played around a little bit. They were all fine, and if I wanted to tackle the learning curve, I could have chosen one of them in which to rewrite this site. But they all had their quirks: ExpressionEngine is huge, powerful, and complex; TextPattern looked promising and is open-source, but the interface seemed dated; Movable Type 4 performed well but didn’t offer anything that my current Wordpress install couldn’t handle, and I couldn’t get ImageMagick to work properly.

When the current generation of blog frameworks were born, bloggers’ desires were less extravagant: “Let me write.” Now, bloggers seem to say, “Let me write. Oh, and post photos, quotes, links, and aggregate content from my social news sites.”

The frameworks have started to catch up, but none of them (Wordpress included) handle those demands effortlessly. You can get anything with plugins, but each plugin adds another potential layer of complexity that could make maintaining the blog more difficult.

None of the frameworks were good enough to draw me away from Wordpress, though. The only thing I don’t like about wordpress are the overused default themes. John Gruber’s wisdom gave me the confidence that Wordpress would work well:

What makes the sites Trotter mentions notable isn’t that they’re all using Movable Type, but that they’re all based on original designs.

What makes Design Observer so good isn’t that it feels Movable Type-y, but that it feels Design Observer-y. Zeldman uses WordPress, and the result is pure Zeldman-y goodness. The same goes for WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg — nothing about his Photo Matt weblog looks or feels WordPress-y to me.

The blog engine doesn’t matter. Content and original design distinguish a good blog from a cookie-cutter one.

So I stopped wasting my time thinking about reinventing the wheel, grabbed a few plugins, converted my Fireworks template to HTML, and moved on. I have more important things to do than fiddle with the inner workings of my own blog. If I ever need to change blog software, the worst that could happen would be that I’d need to whip up some Python and SQL to migrate my old content. That’s one benefit of programming knowledge: You’re never really locked in as long as you can grab all of the data.

For now, Wordpress serves my needs nicely and lets me get back to my other projects. Right now my theme markup and code isn’t as organized or correct as it could be, but I’m satisfied with the knowledge that (1) I know better, and (2) no one should care whether or not I have a few extra divs in my personal blog design.¹

Refocusing Priorities: it’s a wonderful thing. Use tools that help you get stuff done. Don’t reinvent the wheel when your time would be better spent elsewhere.²

Posted 30 June 2008 in Meta, Tech

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