Interesting. Just today, doing a followup scan of blogs, I saw two cases where bloggers were bemoaning problems with their blogs–and in each case said
“As soon as this blog moves to WordPress…”
Oops. Make that three. Just today.
You know what I almost never see? Let me refine that: I don’t remember ever seeing this, although I’m sure it’s been said:
“As soon as this blog moves away from WordPress…”
Yes, I’ve seen cases where people want to move off WordPress’ free hosting service–but in every case, they want to start a WordPress blog hosted elsewhere.
Do I love everything about WordPress? No. I wish it wasn’t quite so good at swallowing clearly-marked paragraph breaks–sometimes even when they’re marked as such in HTML. (I’ve heard this called a problem with the WYSIWYG editor. I’m not sure that’s true.)
Other than that… Let’s see:
- It’s open source. Check.
- There are many, many first-rate templates–and it’s not hard to modify templates, even for an HTML dummy like me.
- As far as I can tell, most templates default to a “printer style” that’s clean, free of cruft, works right in FireFox and is generally admirable.
- Add-ins. Lots of add-ins. Several different ways to control spam and other garbage–none of them perfect, but Spam Karma 2 (and, I suspect, Akismet) is pretty good. Even without using Capcha, which I’d rather not do.
- It works. It works well.
I haven’t tried lots of other blogging software. I do have a Blogger/blogspot blog to announce new issues of Cites & Insights–and, if you look at those posts (which use exactly the same HTML as the W.a.r. equivalent), you see that Blogger seems to be having trouble with vertical spacing…way too much of it. I’m sure that’s fixable, but as far as I can tell it used to be better and is getting progressively worse.
I have no real opinion about SixApart software (TypePad, LiveJournal, Movable Type) except that a very high percentage of SixApart blogs yield defective printouts in FireFox, defective in a consistently awful manner that suggests an issue in the software or its defaults.
But if someone asks me, I’d say “I don’t know all the platforms, but isn’t it interesting that people are so anxious to move to WordPress…and you don’t hear much about people moving away from WordPress.”
Doesn’t make my words any clearer or more elegant, but at least it’s the right platform.
Oh, if you’re wondering: PALINET uses WordPress for its blogs.
Hi Walt, when I first start blogging I compared Blogger to WordPress. WordPress easily was the more feature-rich and usable tool. I am just in the process of moving my blog from my free WordPress site to a purchased host. One reason I picked the host because it offered a WordPress installation. I should have done a little more research because the WordPress version there is 2.0, lower than the much more advanced version available on the free site, e.g., just categories, no tags. However, the conversion has been fairly painless using the WordPress utilities, and I am still very pleased with it overall.
People who know more than I about the inner workings advised me that the paragraph problems in WP 2.3.* are fixed by disabling the visual editor (not quite a WYSIWYG editor). I have tried that and it does fix the problem. It’s an annoying workaround (one I don’t actually use on a regular basis), and one that should be addressed, but not annoying enough to persuade me to go back to MT by a long shot.
Another question is what happens next. Does WP stay the preeminent program? It can be hard to remember, but in 2003, MT was the hot package (before it went fee-based) and WP itself was just evolving out of b2evolution, which is a ghastly product I’ve had the misfortune to have to deal with in several situations. It’s fairly obvious that WP is the “it platform” at present. A good question is what happens next.
geeze, senility is upon me… using the same sentence at the beginning and end of a single paragraph!
Then again, I could do an upgrade to WP 2.3.1 to the current features. Piece of cake. Thanks again, WordPress.