whatsinmybutt.com on 20110925
Recently, I have wanted to share pictures on my website directly from my phone. I struggled to find a way to make it work with my previous Drupal installation. I tried to email to post, RSS feed post to node from Tumblr, I tried logging in the full website from my phone, but a solution was not satisfactorily found. After looking around at resources on the web and in my local vicinity, I decided to go with the choice that most said was obvious: WordPress. So welcome.
WordPress has an iphone app that will allow me the mobility to share with the ease. Also, after working with WordPress for the last couple of days, I have really enjoyed the smooth back-end interface and intuitive built-in features that Drupal required alot of attention and know-how to achieve. Achieve is not what ever really happened between me and Drupal. I had spent the better part of the last two years dedicating my learning to Drupal and mobile accessibility was the final straw. I just couldn’t bear to spend another thirty hours trying to figure out the module configuration and work arounds that were needed in order to stay in touch via my phone.
On my end, I never have learned PHP, this probably would have made Drupal easier. Also, I realize Drupal has alot of great features, but I came to conclude after a couple of days with WordPress, that I probably won’t ever need such a robust and versatile application like Drupal, because the sites I build don’t have thousands of pages and hundreds of users. Currently, I have two sites that I am working on for clients and a third that is WordPress site, that I will be maintaining for the next couple of months. Also, whether fair or not, Drupal was always a hard sell. People hear the word blog, and they expect to see WordPress somewhere. Drupal was a very adequate blogging system, it just didn’t have the name recognition. Because of this, users were able to blame the system, because they as users weren’t willing to get past the name/system and I wasn’t always confident enough to stand tall behind what I had built. Finally, because WordPress is the most recognized system, most other blogging systems have mimicked it’s layout, functionality and look (backend wise), thus even if they had never used WordPress, if they had ever blogged or even used email, they were more familiar with WordPress than Drupal.
I could go on about the differences
- Drupal allows for a completely customizable backend
- <-these bullet points required an add on module (WYSIWYG) that made out of the box Drupal more time intensive, this WordPress comes with WYSIWYG inside core
- WYSIWYG = i understand that Drupal is so customizable that the WordPress WYSIWYG might not fit content-types inside Drupal, but having the ability for myself and clients to add pictures like the one above with a standard WordPress install will save me countless hours in configuration
- built in taxonomy views or categories in wordpress lingo
Maybe, I am just quitting something that when it gets hard, I move on. Adding yet something else, that I am familiar with and mildly successful, but certainly not an expert, nor wildly successful. Maybe, it just reflects my ever changing interests and my lessons learned.
I have a long way to go to understand the WordPress environment, but in the meantime, I am hoping I can spend more time learning to theme and less time developing. Today’s screenshot is a basic WordPress Framework, so I’ll be making alot more changes over the coming weeks. Eventually, I will configure my former site, so that I don’t lose the last two years worth of posted work. I have already tried porting the content, but it didn’t work real well, so eventually I plan on archiving the site and moving on.
I’ve got alot of work to finish, here’s to hoping WordPress will make it go smoother and faster.
Thanks.
1 comment
Comment by CB
CB September 26, 2011 at 5:16 pm
Maybe, I am just quitting something that when it gets hard, I move on.
Different jobs require different tools. It’s one thing to really dig in and explore a subject in detail, it’s another to try to shove a square block in a triangle hole. This mirrors my complaint with python. Modules are great for a while until the developers lose interest, or 8 developers create the same thing with slightly different feature sets. Then what?
Anyway, looking forward to more shots on the go!