Why I Chose WordPress — Thoughts from WordCamp 08

While listening to some session at the WordCamp 08 in Hamburg, I was thinking why most of the people are using WordPress.

First a small history lesson about blogging software I was considering using for my blog.

Ages ago, when Textpattern was in it’s infancies, I was shure I would use either WordPress or Textpattern after trying to install both of them together with Movable Type. Movable Type was the then blogging software of choice.

I was a newbie regarding blogging software and server configuration at this time. Installation took me for

• WordPress: about 5—10 minutes. Quite easy, no hassels.
• Textpattern: about the same as for WordPress
• Movable Type: about 45 minutes while dying with pain

So, no Movable Type for me.

Movable Type probably has changed since then, but they still rely on their foundation they then built. Getting lots of venture capital doesn’t help to make this software more usable. At least they gave non-technical people a way to get into blogging without having to get a hoster and set up their blog by themselves.

Coming back to WordPress. Because Movable Type was out and I wasn’t willing to pay for a blogging software — there are some nice commercial ones — I opted for WordPress because of the wealth of themes and plugins. I would probably have chosen Textpattern over WordPress because I really like the beauty of reduced design and typography which was the main feature of Textpattern. Also Textpattern used Textile, a built-in web text generator which lets you style your text in less arkward ways then html.

On WordPress I use Markdown, which is a similar generator and available as a WordPress plug-in.

But there’s one thing which would let me drop WordPress: PHP.

WordPress is built with PHP. PHP applications tend to be more of a security issue for internet servers than other comparable solutions. Therefore I really would like to shut down PHP on my server to avoid security holes. Okay, some people will hate me for writing this.

If I’ll get my stuff together I may change to an all Ruby version running Ruby on Rails for a coming web application of mine. The blog will also be built on Ruby / RoR.

We’ll see.

Über den Autor

Michael Nordmeyer, früherer CTO und Mit-Gründer der 13. Stock Online Relations und freiberuflicher Software- und Webentwickler berät und entwickelt Konzepte, Strategien und Lösungen in den Bereichen Social Media, mobilen Apps auf iPhone und iPad und Webanwendungen in Ruby on Rails und Java.

Schlagwörter: Blogging, Movable Type, Textpattern, WordCamp, WordPress