"wordpress" in Weblog

It’s been a long time coming but willbarras.com has finally gone live! It started out as a proper portfolio site but we’ve ended up with an illustration blog. Will’s work is AMAZING and I’ve not seen this format used for this kind of thing before so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes. Will’s put up 30 images to start with so there’s plenty to look at. My favourites are: Welder, Brolly, Falconry Centre and St Ives.

On a side note, this is my first go with Wordpress. On the plus side, there were plenty of plugins, helpful forums packed with troubleshooting tips and tricks, the Tiger skin for the admin area is gorgeous and I had the basics of the site up and running I no time. On the other hand, I had to hack half the plugins, which were mostly terribly written, I had to delve into the core code to extract some very simple functionality because everything is ‘echo’ed not returned, and the official documentation is sparse. In the end, I probably could have written it from scratch in the time it took me to hack other peoples’ code to do what I wanted.

I don’t know whether I’ll be using it again… For a straight-ahead blog: probably; for something out of the ordinary: no.

I’ve had ‘convert website to blogging tool’ on my to-do list for bloody ages now… Well over a year. Right above ‘redesign website’, which has been there for 2 years now. So far I’ve been most impressed with Textpattern and Wordpress but I was just looking at Symphony and it could just be a contender. I suspect that it may not be as customisable as I’d like but it appears to be very well thought out, with a lovely interface and I really like the fact that the 21degrees guys have chosen XSLT for their templating language over a bespoke one.