(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:25 am)
I’ve been away from WordPress for a little over three years, when I moved to Expression Engine (EE) on a dedicated virtual server. Well…I’m baaaack!
Good Reasons
The reason I moved to EE in the first place was that I thought I was about to outgrow WordPress to graduate into a more comprehensive Content Management System (CMS). The features I thought I needed:
- The ability to manage users for digital subscription services
- The ability to have an open forum and wiki area
- The need to manage multiple websites under one system
- The ability to charge money for website design by basing my services on a well-known commercial offering
The first three items on that list were related to the grand plans I had in my head (and have written about here) for taking what I was doing with the various Printable CEO forms. I was enjoying the community aspects of what was happening, and thought that the next “responsible” thing to do would be to grow into some kind of community site.
Three years later, and what I’ve learned is the opposite of what I had dreamed I needed. It turns out I do NOT want to manage a community site; I’d rather be writing, reading, or making things that turn into things I post about. I also do NOT want to be offering professional website development; I’d much rather do SIMPLE website development. So the very things that make EE great actually end up not being useful to me.
Technical Reasons
So why even move from Expression Engine, after spending hundreds of hours customizing it to my needs? I just find I like WordPress better as a platform, and when faced with the task of converting from Expression Engine 1.6.x to 2.0.1, I figured I might as well jump ship entirely. Don’t get me wrong: EE is a fine system, and the new version is built on top of their well-regarded CodeIgniter framework (which I use on my design website) which means that it’s even more powerful than before. But it’s power that I don’t need, and it comes with additional overhead that I don’t have time for. I feel like I can drive WordPress like a dune buggy if I wanted to.
Here’s what I really like on WordPress:
- Theming is way more immediate. You can not just “swap themes” on Expression Engine like you can on WordPress, which I find to be something of a downer when I want play blog dress-up.
- I like the way themes work on WordPress. The templating system for Expression Engine is very powerful and designer-friendly, but I’d rather write straight PHP now.
- Admin control panel is geared toward managing a CMS, not writing a blog. Things like auto-save, categories management, comment management, etc are not streamlined to the writer’s workflow. You can customize all that stuff by recoding it, but I don’t have the time.
- Plugins are much easier to write. The number of hooks available within EE were (at the time I looked) pretty limited. There are also a lot more of them available, of course, for WordPress.
- More efficient page-level caching is available on WordPress. EE actually has very capable fine-grained caching mechanisms for application developers, which worked almost as well but still stressed my server.
- Auto Update is Awesome. Updating around an existing custom installation like mine required very careful coordination of saving/uploading files, so much so that I actually wrote a script to do it for me. Now, I just press a button.
- Auto Save is Awesome. No more fretting about accidentally closing the browser window and losing all my work, so I’m more relaxed.
- Much better integration into the “blogosphere” through the various notification mechanisms. They never quite worked for me with Expression Engine. Do people still do trackbacks?
Net result? I feel more like blogging. It’s amazing what a difference it makes to pull up the WordPress back-end and feel like it’s working with me, not against me.
What I’m not looking forward to is increased spam. EE did a phenomenal job of blocking most spam until maybe a couple of months ago, when I started to see a lot more hand-entered stuff. However, I also noticed that I saw a lot FEWER comments. I’d assumed that this was because my writing wasn’t capturing the imagination of readers, but it may be due to overaggressive anti-spam measures. I’ve read similar things about some of the WordPress security plugins, and of course there have been a lot of WordPress exploits reported in the past year.
Design Changes
The new blog theme is a simplification of the old theme. For posterity here’s the recent progression from SeahTwo (left) to Seah2010 (right) via TwentyTen (center):
TwentyTen is pretty good-looking out of the box. Seah2010 is a “child theme”, which means it’s essentially TwentyTen customized with my own header and typography. The nice thing about making a child theme is that when the parent theme is updated with new features, they will automatically carry across (in most cases) to my child theme. I’ll probably have to modify some of my template files, but the vast majority of files I will not have to touch.
I’m missing some features on SeahTwo, most notably the sidebar elements from the old theme and the prominent header placement of the Printable CEO and Compact Calendar, but I’m sure they will come. I have the large task now of retagging and cleaning up the 1500+ articles I have into some coherent, browsable form. The content here has always been a giant mess, and I’m just about ready to wade in and clean house.
Return to More than WordPress
The change back to WordPress is also symbolic: I think I’ve come to terms with what I want to do, which is to just keep writing about what catches my eye and sharing what I learn. I don’t need to be constrained to a niche, role, or easy-to-understand package. I can MAKE those things, but I think I do best when I’m allowed to freely go from topic to topic. What counts, I am finding, is that something happens and something is made. These become the connection points for random Googlers and blog readers around the world, and from these connections a pattern forms. I’m not interested in occupying a niche and defending it. I want to be in the niches that I find interesting, and I think the people I most like to be with are the same way. The eclectic, multi-faceted, creatively-minded and easily-fascinated people like me will find what I’m up to interesting and useful. That’s the market!
We’ll see how it goes :-)
10 Comments
Welcome back :)
Agreed. Welcome back.
I’ve no idea what expression engine is like but I just love WordPress and I love developing on it.
I also do NOT want to be offering professional website development; I’d much rather do SIMPLE website development
For some reason that struck a cord with me. What we think we want and what we really want often doesn’t even match up. Good nudge for anybody to dig down and evaluate standing and future projects.
Re: Increased Spam, there’s three WordPress plugins I use to combat spam, and they have worked extremely well for me, without hindering real comments from real people.
Simple Trackback Validation – This plugin basically adds a couple of simple automated checks to validate incoming trackbacks, and in the process it blocks 99.99% of trackback spam. It works so well that I now simply set it to delete anything that fails its tests and forget about it.
Cookies for Comments – Uses a rather straightforward mechanism to validate that your commenters are real people by simply requiring a unique cookie to be sent with the comment. Works well, and the only “real” people it blocks are the paranoid ones who block all cookies by default. Which is virtually nobody.
Akismet – The very few remaining hand entered spams I still get are generally picked up by Akismet, after these other two block the rest. Great service. Free for non-commercial use.
The combination of these three plugins is devastating to spam, at the moment. And they don’t require your users to jump through silly captcha hoops, or other burdensome methods that only serve to reduce the amount of real comments you get.
Chris, Penny: Thanks! I didn’t expect to be WELCOMED back; that’s an extra-nice bonus :-)
Peter Knight: Glad that resonated with you…it took a long time for me to distinguish the subtle difference and then not think I was being an idiot. “Shouldn’t I aspire to a model of professional web development?” On the surface, it seems like the answer should always be “yes”, but I think I realized that the kinds of projects I like are when I’m dealing one-on-one, becoming friends as we get to know each other, and helping that person move on when they’ve got their footing. Quite a different model, I think, than the usual professional web services model…and that’s OK!
Otto: Ooo, thanks for those recommendations! I’m using a couple of different plugins that use similar non-captcha measures, but I like the sound of both of these. I’m already using Akismet, of course.
Dave, I truly enjoy the level of reflection that you put towards the decisions you make. It’s clear your switch back to WordPress is as much philosophical as it is technical. I hope the move frees you to continue in the directions you wish to go.
Dave,
As usual, really good read. Thanks for going into detail about why and how you did the transition back. As someone who is looking more and more to WordPress as a development option, this article is just what I needed to read.
thanks again!
Testing anti-spam measures for over-aggressiveness…
Thank you. You helped me (again – but you do not know). I am still thinking on a transition to WordPress. Now I know what the planning will have to be and what to consider
Hey Dave ole buddy of mine. Love the look of the site. Way cool. Tell everyone at Starbucks “hi” for me please. I updated my blog today. Had lots of post that I had not published yet. Keep on blogging Dave. You mean a lot to many people out there. You matter! Come visit me in the Caribbean soon! I’ll be care-taker for a Catamaran in Culebra, Puerto Rico in the Spanish Virgin Islands. Can take you for a nice sail!!! Erin