WordPress at the First Glance.
Before building up my web site I hadn’t practical opportunity to get acquainted with WordPress. There are a lot of positive opinions about this CMS in the internet. To form my own opinion to this topic was actually one of the motivations to make WordPress to the base of i-gorod.
First of all I’d like to mention one negative aspect. I didn’t like the structure and the organisation of the WordPress web site (http:// wordpress.org). It was not immediately clear where to start, where the plugins can be found and it seemed to me quite exaggerated with all the introduction texts, that should help a one with orientation on the web site, but indeed they just harmed the general usability. Well that just my humble opinion. Let’s go on…
No wonder that I took the latest version of WordPress. At current moment it is 2.1. The installation was really easy. If one follows exactly the instructions from the readme.html, that is shipped with WordPress, less then in 3 minutes you have already a functioning platform. I found it nice that the administrator could define the prefix of the database tables, so that more then one instance of WordPress can run on the same database. Well, you may say it’s a standard feature that is offered by almost all modern CMS, but still I find such care about the user very kind.
The next step was to integrate my own design into WordPress. On this stage I was pleasantly surprise how easy it is! I’m a lazy man, so I copied already existing theme into new directory. Afterward one needs to go through all the files in this directory and make changes. The structure of the theme files (header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php etc.) is quite obvious, so even for a newcomer in html programming it would be no real challenge.
The administration part of WordPress I found quit satisfying. Only one moment is annoying. I’m not happy that much, when an application or software platform thinks, that it knows better what I want to see on the main page. In WordPress I didn’t find so far the possibility to configure the main page of administration (dashboard) and how to switch off the WordPress news and blogs.
As for the performance of WordPress concerned, I can’t say anything so far. The time will show. Neither I have tested some additional plugins. Surely I’ll change my experience here, when I have some info on this questions on the hand.
In the conclusion I want to say that WordPress makes a nice impression at the first glance. It’s very friendly and simple to use. For such little sites as mine, where you want to have a blog and some static pages WordPress is more then enough. If you want your site to be best equiped with forums, chat rooms, photo galaries etc. then I guess you would need something more professional like Drupal (http://drupal.org).