Why I Changed To WordPress – Sort Of
I read an article on OS News (one of my dailies) which is called "Why You Shouldn't Write Your Own Kernel Anymore".
It's one of the best editorials I have read on OS News, and tells the story of how the author realized that it was better to make his product work for linux, than trying to make his own OS with this particular product as a part of it.
Transposed to blogging, It's one of the main reasons why I changed to WordPress from my own blogging software – a lot more people will care and benefit from your work if you make it for an existing system, instead of always wasting your time playing catch-up by copying features from that very system.
Changing to WordPress was part of a larger change in attitude for me. It was just the start, and I think that attitude will get me much further.
And might I add, that it is nice to have a close brother in blogging-tool-choice to bounce ideas with.
Now, start writing some damn code!
There's a rule: PHP savvy switchers to WP have to release a plugin within their first week using the software. Get crackin'! We're glad to have you. :-)
I did :) Take a look at bloghelper in the categories section of my menu on the right hand side :)
I also released EasyTags, even though that's not very useful yet.
Haha, it's true, he wrote two within the week! I can witness to that. I'm still gritting my teeth waiting for a "threaded comments" plugin.
Hint hint :)
Man the dentists are going to be dealing with some serious TMJ. I am too! Not to be greedy or anything.
Welcome to the community.
I have suggested making it a switchable feature in wordpress, but I haven't heard much about it.
Making it as a plugin is not the best approach, but I guess I could try.
A Switchable feature?
How so?
Something you can turn on by setting an option in the wordpress options pages.
Oh, Ok. That would be nice.
I tried rolling my own with XML, XSL, and PHP. I got tired of adding features, and tweaking XSL yet another way to get something working. I switched to WP, imported my MT stuff, and it's been working great ever since!
I was writing my own for a long time as well. I'd taken a look at wordpress on my friends computer, and thought about maybe switching for a while. Then one evening, I thought I'd get the latest wordpress and see how hard it would be too migrate the database and all that, just as a test case.
But after a couple of hours I was done with migrating both the database and the design, so I thought "why not" and switched.
The next few days I migrated my bloghelper applet as a plugin (my first) and my threaded comments.
I am very happy that I did that.
Funny, I'm moving away from WordPress to my own system. WordPress simply doesn't fulfill my needs, and hacking WordPress to make it is too much an effort.
(Plus I'm now hacking in Python, which I like much more than PHP, but that's a personal thingy)
I think it's reasonably easy to hack wordpress – the hard part comes when you need to upgrade a heavily hacked version to the next version of wp. That's my guess anyway.
I think it's a shame that you don't expend your effort towards macking wordpress more friendly to people who want to customize and extend it.
That's what I resolved to do. I think I nearly drove poor Matt nuts the first week or two. Since that I have had a period of sparetimelessness, so I haven't been that active lately, but I am getting back into the groove of things.
I can completely understand your sentiments with regards to Python and PHP. Python is my everyday scripting language of choice. It's very elegant.
I personally really, really don't like the design and look of the PHP language.
I think it's great how easy it is to make things with it, but it's such a sinful mess to look at.
It seems it's creators are very fond of Perl and C, which are both languages I have used extensively and that are definitely useful, but aestethic they are certainly not.
But making web things with Python is definitely not nearly as easy as with PHP, so I am sticking for PHP for the time being.
Brian, I could have added that my ideas (and therefore requirements) cannot be achieved in WordPress without rewritting it. That's why I'm building my own system now.
Welcome to the WordPress Community. I love the way you have your threaded comments set up. I also like how you have your categories and sub-categories done. I think I'll have to be adding your site to my links of blog designers I like to pay attention to. :)
The site is looking great, and you're right. With a community project like WordPress, everyone can contribute and make it better. :D
I really like your look, and your comments set up. Any chance of you sharing that with us? :)
Yes, there's a good chance of it :)
After Matt linked to my blog I have gotten a slew of new visitors, and I have gotten a lot of positive feedback on my threaded comments.
I wasn't planning on making them as a plugin, but rather see if I could get them included into the basic wordpress installation as as feature you could turn on – but all this positive feedback tells me that a lot of people would like them now, and I will try to accomodate that.
I am probably going to work on a plugin version today, so stay tuned.
I'm rather excited to see the plugin. =)
Looking good!
I'd be willing to wait until it was added to a nightly, if that's the best way to do it. I think it's something that the community would love, particularly as an option that could be switched on and off.
I second Tom. I haven't switched to WordPress because it doesn't seem to have nested/threaded comments, but this is beautiful. How do I get it?
Yes, this comment system is very nice!
Could we get it?
To everyone who has mentioned my threaded comments on this thread, you can find the plugin version here:
Brian's Nested Comments.