I finished migrating Pleasant Interruption over to WordPress. We begin yet another chapter in the history of Pleasant Interruption which goes back all the way to the beginning of 2005. From Blogger, to b2evolution, to Drupal, and now, finally, to WordPress.
It’s strange, as WordPress never caught my eye back at the end of 2005. Rather, if I recall correctly, I think the main reason why I went with Drupal (and had used b2evolution prior) was that we could have separate “blog” pages(and RSS feeds) for each author but have all the posts aggregate on the main page as well.
Now that I am much more experienced with web programming it seems so trivial to me to simply write a separate template for each author showing only their posts.
In any case, I still love Drupal as a full-blown CMS but the important lesson here is to use the right tool for the right job. And for a blog, nothing comes even close to WordPress. It’s so polished and it isn’t riddled with extra garbage that Drupal comes with. In fact, I love WordPress so much that I’ve migrated a bunch of other sites I manage to WordPress, using it as a basic CMS. I think for all but large community-style websites WordPress totally outshines both Drupal and Joomla(the 2 go-to CMS softwares).
I think what does it for me is the inclusion of a WYSIWYG editor by default. I’ve always loathed Drupal for not having one built in. The main problem with Drupal is that it’s designed by developers, FOR developers. I liken it to Linux whereas WordPress is the Mac. Convention over configuration; as is the (Ruby on) Rails philosophy that I have come to so dearly love. Drupal is powerful, but too powerful for its own good. An end-user of a CMS doesn’t care what the “input format” is. Nor do they care about revisions, or menu links, etc. The language is too techie: “node” and “taxonomy” are two that stick out like a sore thumb.
But WordPress get it. The end user only wants to be able to create and manage content. Leave the technical decisions to the person setting it up and building the theme. But otherwise, all the complicated stuff should be hidden and the user should be presented with a simple, beautiful interface.
So here’s to WordPress, for being so awesome.
