Wow, I’m glad I’m finally updating the old frame-based website I set up years ago.
I guess I’ve never really had time to bite the bullet and re-write the site properly, from the ground up myself. Doing this wouldn’t only mean writing the HTML, because what I really wanted was a CMS with support for a nice offline client like ecto. I guess this is doable, but would take more free time than I’ve had in the last few years.
So when I did the redesign I started out looking for software I could use to bring things up to date with minimum hassle so I could actually update content rather than deal with the infrastructure all day.
At first I looked at textpattern, but although it seemed really powerful, using it would mean learning a whole new markup language, something I didn’t really want to get into. Also the first couple of themes I tried for it failed in various odd ways, out of the box…
Enter Wordpress, a simple and very widely used blogging platform. Surely I could set up a site with this in no time. Well… Nearly… If I wanted to use the default theme it would take all of five minutes, but finding an attractive theme on the other hand… Well that’s a whole different story.
There are a ton of themes out there for Wordpress, but most of them either:
- Didn’t work with the latest Wordpress release.
- Where just plain buggy as hell.
- Looked messed up in IE.
- Or where not what I was looking for visually.
In the end I found the Barthelme theme, which is a nice, clean, well-maintained, standard-complient theme and with a bit of customization was just what I was looking for.
Using an external software package is nice and all, but inevitably there’s customization and <gasp> bug-fixing to do. So I’ve now set things up with Mercurial Queues which is a nice way for maintaining your own changes on top of a changing source-base. So hopefully I’ll be able to upgrade to new versions of Wordress as they come out pretty easily.
So with as sprinkling of automated backup scripts the update is finally done - woohoo!
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This CMS business is a tragicomedy. Apparently just about everybody about to set up a tech blog looks for a decent CMS, and looks, and looks, and keeps looking, and says “yikes”, and thinks about rolling his own, no, wait, that would really be way over the edge, I just want to blog, dammit, OK, WP then, ewww, how come it’s so broken, hack, hack, hack, well, I guess I can live with that. Oh, there’s also the hardcore minority actually rolling their own CMS - easily recognizable by the groovy 80’s-style look…
I guess it has to do with all the finishing which is needed for a program with elaborate UI like a CMS. Wouldn’t fit into a few weekends.
I guess it’s just that these popular PHP proggies are “good enough” especially when hacked quickly to suit your needs. What worries me are the Security holes in such programs - web security is not “easy” and it takes a very experienced eye to spot some of the more obscure exploits.
Hopefully the fact that WordPress is so widely used means that someone out there is actively reviewing it
An interesting exercise would be to do some pair programming over a long weekend and try to create a good CMS with one of the new web 2.0 environments (RoR, Django, etc…).
Something like Django gives you the templateing and admin interface “for free”. So it may be possible to create something very attractive in a short amount of time.
Then of course, there’s the high entry bar for getting Django up and running on some shared hosts…
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