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After my incredibly frustrating experience installing and configuring Textpattern, I decided to give WordPress a shot. Talk about night and day. You would either have to have years of experience working with Textpattern, or be a complete masochist, to even consider going with that package.

Neither of which includes me. After downloading the archive, creating a directory for it, unpacking the software, creating a MySQL database complete with credentials, running the installer, a little fiddling with rewrite rules—I had WordPress up and running with friendly URLs in 10 minutes. Okay, maybe not the famous 5-minute install, but I'm cautious and don't like to make mistakes that come back to haunt me later.

Themes

The default theme is okay, or you can go with the "classic" interface via the base install. Both one of which are a big improvement over Textpattern's default (boy, TP sure is the whipping boy around here lately). Anyway, I shopped around for a nice theme and quickly settled on iNove which is slick out of the box, and I discovered later really easy to tweak. Right off the bat I was impressed with this guy's skills. Little things like using Sprites for icons and other imagery, make a big difference.

Plugins

Plugins are a joy to work with. They're easy to install, and if you go with crowd favorites you're bound to find one that is well-documented, smartly coded and doesn't interfere with WordPress itself or other plugins. Thus far I've installed:

• Ajax Calendar — replaces WP calendar with one that doesn't page refresh
• Akismet — blocks trackback and comment spam
• Dagon Sitemap Generator — fully customizable sitemaps
• Google XML Sitemaps — for Google indexing, not users as above
• Highslide — zoom image thumbnails with many options
• Markdown — lightweight markup language for easier authoring of posts
• Page Links To — easily create links that are external to WP or offsite
• PageNavi — advanced paging navigation
• RecentComments — display recent comments in your sidebar
• Related Posts — create related posts links via tags
• SRG Clean Archives — search engine friendly archive listings
• WP-Syntax — source code syntax highlighting via GeSHi

Administration

Like any admin interface, it takes some getting used to. But I found the learning curve fairly shallow and was soon up to speed. Configuring your sidebar is really nice. You select items on the left side to place on the right, and using Ajax you can order them however you want by drag and drop. One thing that had me puzzled at first was the four sidebar sections: north, south, east and west. At first I pictured the entire page, but then realized your sidebar is dived into top, middle and bottom, with the middle having a left (west) and a right (east). Makes perfect sense now.

Configuring the menu bar was also a little strange. These are referred to as "pages" rather than "posts." You can put anything you want into them or use a plugin such as the sitemap generator mentioned above. The interface for adding content to these pages is almost the same as regular posts, but you can disable things like commenting and such so they appear as, well, normal content. Or you can "perma" link any of them to some other page, as I did in the case of my Contact option.

I fiddled with the theme stylesheet quite a bit to get things the way I wanted. It's easy to do right from the admin interface by selecting the Design tab then the Theme Editor. I also added a Blogroll OPML link next to my RSS feed at the top of the sidebar. But that involved a little PHP coding, adding a third icon to the feeds Sprite and again, modifying the CSS. I also fiddled with some other icon sprites, but I won't go into that here.

Conclusion

There are still a few little things that perturb me, for instance, when WordPress magically reformats my raw content when I select "Edit post" from the public side. My advice is to use the admin interface for fixing typos and such. I would also prefer a post preview that doesn't involve opening a new window (or tab if you have your browser configured that way). I can understand the rationale behind it, and I'm sure I could come up with a better solution. That really is the power of open-source software, if you have the skills you can make it do anything you want. Plus, using a scripting language like PHP makes it all that much easier. Especially when the code is well written and documented. Serendipity is a nightmare, at least this old version I'm still using.

But not for long! I will announce when I plan on moving over to the new blog permanently.