If you have been reading recently then you know that I have been having a few problems configuring Drupal 6 after upgrading from version 4.7. After looking through many configuration settings, and all the modules needed to do what I wanted I could see that Drupal was too much for what I needed.

The Competition

After decided to move away from Drupal the first thing I did was try to figure out what it was I wanted to do. You could say I wrote a Specification Document for myself. I decided that I wanted the following things:

• A Blog – it is the main reason to have a personal site. A place to spout off.
• Multi-Media handling – ability to upload images mostly to create rich posts.
• Integration with Social websites (Twitter etc).
• Extensibility – the ability to customize the look and functionality of the site.
• Ease of use – it should be easy to maintain and post.

My first thought was SquareSpace, mostly due to all the ads I see on twit.tv and Revision3. Their free trial was great and really gave me a chance to play with the tools they offer and get a feel for it. It really is an amazing service, I had a really nice looking site up and running in no time. It’s very easy to post and modify the look. But my main problem with it was that you only get the modules they offer you, there is no option for digging into the code and doing something custom. Even the generated HTML seems to be set, with few options for customizing it. Everything is done through the WYSIWYG editor, and custom CSS.

Next I looked at Ruby on Rails, and after reading a lot about it and watching the screencasts I was into it. I was ready to try and code my blog from scratch and do everything myself. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that I really just want something to work right away, and play with making it better not making it work. My problem with Drupal was that I spent more time setting up, and making things work than I did actually posting stuff. I did not want to get into that again.

So while both SquareSpace and Rails are awesome they did not quite fit what I was looking for. SquareSpace is simple and easy to use, but lacks customization. Whereas Rails is the ultimate in customization but would require a lot of setup.

Welcome WordPress!

Actually I had always thought that WordPress was a hosted only blogging service, I had no idea that they offered an opensource package that you could install on your own host. Needless to say I was happy because WordPress seems to offer everything that I want.

The main advantage WordPress has over Drupal is that it knows what it wants to do. WordPress is blogging software, that’s it. Drupal’s goal is to do nearly everything you could want it to do, which is great but makes something harder for the user to do.

WordPress makes it easy to upload images, write posts, and manage it all in a clean and nice to look at interface. The raw PHP themes were a little hard to grasp, and I am still tweaking them, but they offer a lot of power. And via the Modules I can extend the functionality of the site if I need to.

Also, because of the higher profile of WordPress it is much easier to find pre-made modules, and other sites make sure they work with it.

But is it Good?

So far I am liking what I see, but I am far from an expert. The theme system took me a few hours to figure out what was going on, but after examining some other themes and playing around I got something working pretty quickly. Hopefully modules work just a well.