Website Overhaul09 May
This site used to run on Drupal. I’ve done a couple of actual projects with drupal, and I’ll probably still use it for my redesign of LinuxLaboratory.org, which I hope to finish by the end of the summer. However, Wordpress, over the past year or so, has really stepped up to the plate, and in response, more developers of more plugins and themes have provided a multitude of useful features to take advantage of Wordpress as a platform.
One thing that drives me insane where any open source, pluggable framework is concerned is what I call “development lag”. For example, in Drupal, although the 6.x versions have been out for over a year, there are a lot of rather important plugins that haven’t finalized a version of their plugin for 6.x. Meanwhile, the 6.x versions of Drupal are, in my opinion, where all the cool work is done. So you’ll find yourself in a situation where you need 6.x to run one of the super cool new plugins, but you also need another plugin, and the only version available for 6.x is a development version, if that. And what happens when 7.x comes along?
Wordpress, of course, could easily fall victim to this same phenomenon. The things that make me want to take it on anyway are related to maintenance. I’m a business owner. I do technical work for a living. However, I’d like my hours spent doing technical work to be billable. I don’t really want to do a lot of ongoing maintenance work, constantly going through motions to apply security patches, update themes, upgrade the software, etc., etc. Wordpress makes these things so Mind Numbingly Easy™ that it’s just about a non-event. One-click plugin installations and updates are nice, and if you do a Subversion installation, then even doing updates from the command line are a breeze.
So, the site you see here is actually a Wordpress installation with a fancy theme (I’ll not say which one, only because it might change, making this post wrong at some point in the future). Let me know how you like it!