A little over a month after moving to WordPress, I’m giving it a resounding two thumbs up. This is a huge upgrade over my ancient fork of the Community Server codebase. Here are a few things that I really enjoy:
- Themes are easy to search, install and tryout. There are a huge number of people actively designing themes so it was easy to find one that provided the features I wanted, including a good experience on mobile devices.
- Updates show up as notifications in the admin page. Click the button an voila, you just upgraded WordPress.
- The database backend runs MySQL which was new for me, but it’s been a good experience to learn. My favorite part of it is that the database schema is so simple. There are only a dozen or so tables and you can understand most of it by just looking at the table and field names.
- There are an enormous number of plugins available, and like the themes, they are easy to search and install. I have plugins for things like Google Analytics, Microsoft Application Insights, Instagram, Twitter, Akismet comment spam blocking, and a sitemap generator for the Google and Bing indexer robots. Updating these plugins is just a simple click.
- One of the best plugins I’m using gives me a calendar view of my posts. You know by now that I write posts out in advance and schedule them to come out one per day around the middle of the night. Seeing the calendar view is an easy way to make sure that I haven’t missed a day, and it’s easy to swap posts around if I want to reorder them.
The list goes on an on but I’m very happy with this. My recommendation of WordPress for your website is pretty pointless. They’ve been around for 11 years. 60 million websites use them including more than 20% of the top 10 million websites. I’m really late to the game, but I’m glad I’m joining the game.