What I have wrought, Part 1: Investigation & Evaluation

July 2, 2006 · Filed Under blogging

Ok, I guess it’s safe to finally expound a bit on what I’ve done in this (latest) redesign of Territorial Bloggings. In order to keep things reasonably readable, I’ll be breaking my account up into a few posts.

In Part 1: Investigation & Evaluation, I’ll describe the process by which I arrived at staying with Wordpress (WP).

First off, this was a baseline redesign — everything was on the table, including (especially!) the blogging software (i.e., WP itself). Why? Well, I was seriously considering the move to a more CMS-ish (Content Management System) app, so that I could provide a wider range of information in a rational way. I was also interested in providing a blog-hosting type of service to select folks, and I wanted to have an app that allowed me to do so in an easier-to-manage way than by installing individual WP blogs for each person (which is what I did for TK’s Katie’s Beer). In order to meet these goals, then, I needed to investigate any & all options for powering my site.

I was still somewhat disenchanted with WP - not for any objective reason, but mainly because of a sense of techno-wanderlust and a bit of tech-snobbery. For as good as it is, and it’s plenty good, WP certainly has some less-than-ideal structural/design/semantic flaws. Besides, I’ve been using WP for coming up on 2 years now… So, I set out on an obsessively thorough investigation of a whole bunch of blogging & CMS “engines,” including: Movable Type, Joomla, ExpressionEngine, NucleusCMS, Drupal, XOOPS, b2evolution, and, most intriguingly, Textpattern (TXP). What I found was that a true CMS app is overkill for what I want, need, and am able to do at this point. Most all of these apps enable you to do some incredible things wrt running an informational & well-designed website. But they pretty much demand an incredible amount of time to traverse the learning curve that leads to mastery & ease-of-use. And I don’t really have the time (or inclination) to give over to that type of project. There was, however, a non-WP ray-of-hope — TXP!

At this point, I also realized that my visions (delusions?) of grandeur wrt creating a confessional lutheran clearinghouse were probably not in the cards. While I might still provide some hosting services for a few select folks (or not), it won’t ever be as structured or comprehensive as I envisioned, at least not for the foreseeable future. So, while I wanted to keep this functionality in my thought process, it wasn’t going to be the primary factor that it had been when I looked at the full-blown CMS apps. This, then, really opened the door to TXP, as I was more open than ever to the compromises inherent in its “lightweight CMS” feature set.

So, TXP stormed to the fore, having all sorts of really cool features, and even more going for it in terms of being both cool and “pure.” It has a great developer & support community, it’s very easy to install, and reasonably easy to tweak out & enhance. I had actually made up my mind to change from WP to TXP, figuring out how to migrate my database/archives from WP to TXP, and getting an instance of TXP up & running so that I could play around with getting it designed & tweaked out to my liking well in advance of making an official cutover. Unfortunately, I ran into a few issues, largely dealing with functionality that WP provides via plugins, that I couldn’t figure out quickly or easily enough.

WP & TXP are based on some significantly differing design assumptions, particularly in terms of how to handle design & content elements in order to create a stable, robust, and easily sustainable website. I really liked TXP, and found its philosophical underpinnings to be quite understandable & attractive. That, however, could not overcome the learning curve factor for me.

So, the aforementioned failures forced me into a thorough re-examination of WP. And, that process let me to realize that WP was not deserving of my willing desire to toss it aside! w00t!
Coming up:
Part 2 - (Re)Design Philosophy
Part 3 - Rebuilding the Foundation & Superstructure