from serendipity to wordpress

Continuing my efforts to avoid doing any real work on my various projects and faff about tweaking things for no good reason, I’ve now migrated this blog to be Powered By WordPress. There was no compelling reason to move away from the previous platform (Serendipity), I was just curious about WordPress as it’s one of the most popular blogging platforms around today.

First impressions of WordPress are good. It’s slicker and easier to use on the administration side where Serendipity’s interface feels very Web 1.0, and getting a WYSIWYG post editor to behave was a nightmare to the point that I gave up and entered everything in raw HTML. Some administration tasks in WordPress are still clunky but I read that improvements are coming and plugins help a lot.

Things also tend to just work. I like that. I’ve had a bit of a fight with some Serendipity plugins from time to time. I don’t need that.

WordPress seems to have a larger and more active user and developer community and so more plugins themes and so forth are readily available.

I also built my own custom theme for WordPress to match the established look I had for this site. It was comparable to building the equivalent Serendipity theme in difficulty, though there were a couple of odd omissions from the template “API” that I had to code around.

Overall I’m quite pleased with the new software though I will consider WordPress to be “on probation” for the next while. There have been some quite serious security problems with the software in the recent past and, although I’ve locked down the install as best I can, I will be keeping a close eye on the blog and server over the “probation period” to make sure nothing nefarious sneaks in.

WordPress had better behave itself. The Serendipity install is backed up and standing by, and I haven’t even looked at Movable Type yet!