… Well, sort of. Anybody in the web design industry knows that no project is ever truly complete. There are always little tweaks that could be made or small bugs that need to be fixed. So perhaps “Complete” isn’t the right term. Maybe the phrase “Good Enough for Show” is a bit more appropriate.
Anywho, with WordPress 3.0 as it’s back-end, my new website is now live and ready for the world to see. Hooray! But, I’m sure that some of you may be wondering why I made the transition in the first place? Well, there are a number of reasons…
As much as I love to have complete control over every aspect of my site, that just isn’t practical. Originally, I had created a rudimentary content management system from the ground up using PHP and MySQL, but this turned out to be cumbersome and I didn’t feel like I had the resources to maintain it and keep it secure. It’s better to have a platform that someone else maintains and allows me to use freely.
I considered a few other CMSs such as Joomla and Drupal, but at this point, they seem to be overkill for what I’m doing. I don’t have a lot of other people that update the content of my site, and for the moment, I kind of just want to write. Nothing fancy. And WordPress is primarily a blogging platform, it seems the most appropriate. I also feel that if there’s is anything beyond its scope that I want or need to do, I have the web-design skills needed to take care of it. In fact, you’ll notice that I took the default theme, Twenty Ten, them and tweaked the PHP and CSS to make it better suit my needs. If at any point I feel like I need more, then I will definitely look into some of the more complicated Content Management Systems, but until then, WordPress is working pretty well for me.
One thing that I thought I’d throw out there is this article: How to Create a WordPress Theme From Scratch. While not completely up to date, it did help me to gain a good understanding of the code behind the CMS. I suggest that anyone wanting to learn about customizing their own word press installation should read it.
