Digital Diversified

I’m just a wee bit behind in posting on this website. I’ve been dealing with technological snafus and the inevitable issues that switching to a new CMS bring. (Nevermind that WordPress isn’t technically a CMS. I’m using it to manage my content, so that makes it one in my book.)

Joomla had gotten just a bit too much to handle on a regular basis. I took a good, long, look at everything and realized it was far more program than I actually needed. Which meant that the time I was spending wrestling it into submission was badly invested. Then I looked around at a lot more of the systems I had put into place, and I realized, there were a few that were badly bloated and in need of replacement.

First, Microsoft Outlook had begun to seriously irritate me, so I began looking for a replacement. Then, while I was thinking about it, I realized I wasn’t that fond of the whole Office Suite. Another replacement to find. This on top of needing to migrate all the websites I run to a CMS more suited to my needs, without Joomla’s steep learning curve.

Most critical was the CMS replacement. I could hobble along with Office for quite a while if necessary, but better to start the websites as they were intended to go on. Plus - why invest any more time in learning Joomla if I wasn’t even going to be using it?

So I did some hard thinking and some serious surfing. I thought about what I actually wanted my websites to look like, feel like, function like. I thought about the end user experience I wanted for my visitors. (Which led to a telecommunications overhaul as well, but that’s a subject for a different post.) I thought about how I wanted things to go on the backend as well.

And then I went surfing for a few weeks. I looked at websites until I thought my eyes would fall out from overuse. I compared front ends, I pulled up source code, I went to provider websites and read documentation.

I kept coming back to WordPress. Their front page said it all:

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

Yes, exactly! I’m tired of fighting my CMS. I just want it to work. But what remained was to find out whether the back end was robust enough to handle what I wanted to throw at it, as I had always been told (especially by techie friends, and most especially when I complained about Joomla) that WordPress was just too wimpy for any serious webmaster.

In the end, I just took the plunge and took it for a trial run.

At this point, I’m happy to report that WordPress is most definitely not too wimpy, at least not for this serious webmistress. I installed it and the lovely K2 on nine separate websites, and it has worked like a charm.

It’s almost impossible to break, as I have had occasion to find out. It is very easy to skin. Changing the look and feel is 1011% easier than it is with Joomla.

Changing the function is 2022% easier with WP Plugins than it was with Joomla Component, Extension, and Bot configuration. Unlike Joomla, the plugins I’ve installed have worked flawlessly from upload and activation. (Yes, that’s right. Only two steps required.) There was nothing to figure out. It just worked.

With my website backends all taken care of, I went on a hunt for a M$ Outlook/Office (but at least Outlook!) replacement. But that’s a subject for a separate post.

Later!