John's Adventures

This site has been powered by the open source product WordPress since way back in 2007. In the old days if you wanted a website you’d hand-code it, meaning you’d need to learn about such exciting technologies as HTML and, well, that was about it. Then along came WYSIWYG (that’s What You See Is What You Get) editors like Microsoft FrontPage and NetObjects Fusion that allowed you to focus on the content of your site without delving down into the blood and guts of what made websites work. Of course it never really worked out that way as the sites didn’t quite look the way you wanted. Plus you had to run software on your desktop PC that build and copied the contents up to your web server. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

This eventually changed and web-based products like Movable Type and WordPress came along that meant you could make your site look the way you wanted (by either delving into the blood and guts or choosing a style designed by someone else) then easily post and update the content through your web browser from anywhere.

I followed that progression and this site was originally built and published using a desktop tool called CityDesk. I switched to Movable Type and after a few years, finally over to WordPress where I’ve stayed since. There were other content management systems (as they’re called) available but I liked its ease of install, ease of customisation, ease with which a software developer like me could modify it with plugins via some PHP and JavaScript and just general ease of keeping a site up to date. I could focus on what I wanted to write instead of how it was published, and leave the software to do the rest.

As the years passed WordPress has gotten better and better and I’ve tweaked and evolved my site design frequently to freshen things up. I’ve also added custom functionality that I’ve built myself on top so it was just the way I liked it (I can be a bit fussy).

The interesting thing about WordPress is that there’s a free version – WordPress.org – you can download and install on your server (the one I’ve been using) and, within a few minutes, be publishing to the world. You’re in complete control and can do anything you want including installing any of the thousands of plugins available. But there’s also a different product called WordPress.com which you don’t install on your server, it’s hosted for you. It’s run by the company automattic and while you can create a blog (or site) for free and start publishing immediately, there is a catch (or advantage depending on your point of view). You can’t create plugins or write custom code meaning your ability to change your site’s behaviour is somewhat limited.

While you don’t get anywhere near as much control as WordPress.org running on your own server you do get a lot of cool things. Firstly, it’s built on an infrastructure that hosts some of the highest traffic sites on the internet – and handles it easily. This means you don’t have to worry about keeping your server up and running – they do it for you. Next, as time’s passed I noticed that while I’ve had to write custom code to do some of the nice things I wanted (like supporting photo albums, contact forms, etc), these kind of features and much more now come for free on WordPress.com. There are also things that are actually way beyond what I had and would require some tricky coding to replicate like photo album slideshows, syncing to twitter, Facebook, etc and many other cool things.

Then I spotted a $99 / year upgrade package that gives you the custom theme design option, domain mapping (so I could continue to use johnsadventures.com as my URL), 10GB of space and VideoPress (which I already use for uploading videos). I decided that “what the hell” I’d move my site over as a change is as good as a rest! If I didn’t like it I could always move back. This gave me an opportunity to freshen up my site design a bit and use the cleaner fonts and styles from one of the default themes (twentyeleven) and I’m rather pleased with the result – it’s not hugely different, just better in a lot of small ways. Migrating over my content was dead easy (as were all my images), the design itself took me a couple of nights to do and the transition has been reassuringly simple.

If you’re reading this through a tool like Google Reader then come over and take a look around! Find a photo album and click on one of the pictures, for example. And if you’re reading this on a mobile phone you’ll notice a lightweight theme that’s fast, mobile friendly and much better than having a shed load of graphics loaded before you can squint at tiny text. I’m sure I’ll write about some of the neat features of the platform in time but as I’ve been telling anybody who’ll listen – if you want to start blogging or put a website together then WordPress.org or WordPress.com are my tools of choice!

The only slightly annoying thing is while I trawl through my pre-WordPress posts bringing the pictures on-platform (I don’t have to do it but I’ve been meaning to do it for years) Google Reader treats these updates like they were new posts. If that’s how you keep up to date with things you might like to unsubscribe for a while and keep an eye on my twitter page for new posts!

Well no sooner had I written that I was pondering switching blogging platforms from Movable Type to WordPress than I started actually doing it. One of my many character flaws is that once I get an idea in my head I tend to go 100% all guns blazing and don’t stop until I’ve done it and this was no exception.

Having been a Movable Type user for several years I’d not paid a lot of attention to WordPress other than installing it and having a quick look at it a couple of times. Version 2.3 was coincidentally released just at the time I was thinking of moving my site so I took it as a sign to proceed.

I must say, I’m very very impressed with WordPress. Writing good software that’s easy to use, powerful and fun is very difficult. There aren’t that many people out there that can really do it. But writing good software that’s easy to use, powerful, fun and easy to extend is much harder. WordPress manages to do this very well, better than any software that I can think of. While I know PHP quite well, I hadn’t used Worpress at all yet within 4 evenings I’d managed to do the following:

• Import all my posts and comments from Movable Type
• Create a theme that looked exactly the same as the old site but used the new functionality that WordPress offers (such as improved comment handling)
• Write a plug-in that changes the WordPress WYSIWYG editor to be just the way I like it and tweak the RSS feed to be just the way I like it
• Migrate the ‘My Software‘ section of this site over to WordPress Pages – a much better way to handle things

To an experienced user of WordPress this is all pretty straightforward stuff, but I’m not an experienced WordPress user. Up until a couple of weeks ago I’d never so much as looked at the documentation or actually written a post with it. Now I’ve moved my site to a different platform, haven’t broken any links and it all seemed far too easy – which I like!

My point is that to do what I’ve achieved as a novice MT user moving from WordPress to MT would have been a far more serious undertaking (note that I’m talking about Movable Type 3.x here, I can’t comment on MT4 as I wasn’t impressed enough with it to see what’s changed under the hood). I’d have been able to import my content no problems but creating a theme is a lot harder in MT – they’re stored within the database whereas the theme files in WordPress are files in a folder making them easy to copy onto a test server where I can get things right then simply copy to my live site. With MT I’d have to do a lot of copying and pasting or database updates – not ideal. I’d probably have ended up just using the default template and tweaking that rather than using my existing lovingly created and evolved layout. Of course, some might argue that’s a good thing…

The documentation for WordPress is also worth a mention – whether you’re modifying themes, writing plugins or just trying to figure out how it all works. It can be a bit tricky to find what you’re looking for in the MT documentation (or maybe it’s just me) but the WordPress docs rock. Whenever I was stuck trying to figure something out when creating my theme or plugin the solution was easy to find and explained thoroughly. Feature-wise I think WordPress and Movable Type 4 are pretty much on the same level but I find WordPress to be faster (on my server at least) and with a far more active community in terms of themes and plugins – which is always a good sign for a product. In fact there are so many plugins out there it makes my head spin!

I know they say “a change is as good as a rest” but it’s more than that. I actually feel more inspired since installing WordPress. I can’t put my finger on why but when I log in and look at the clean, slick interface I just want to write something. Which is great news for me – but bad news for you, the poor reader. So I’ll apologise in advance and you can just blame the developers of WordPress – it’s their fault for doing such a damn fine job! 🙂

I’ve been using Movable Type as the power (with a capital ‘P’) behind this site for the last few years and I’ve been pretty happy on the whole. One thing that was missing was a decent WYSIWYG editor (so that when I write a post I can see how it’ll look when it gets published) – but I sorted that one out by using TinyMCE. Another was comment spam but I fixed that with CAPTCHA. Everything was great, it was working happily and despite the fact that I really liked the look of WordPress (more about that later), I was happy to stay put.

Then recently Movable Type 4 was released. I installed a beta version to have a play around and I really liked it. It’s organised similarly to WordPress (which is much nicer to work with than Movable Type 3) and it seemed very slick. That is, until I tried editing a post. Six Apart have implemented their own WYSIWYG editor and, to be frank, it’s nowhere near good enough. I never find myself switching to the plain HTML view to fix something TinyMCE has messed up and it was only when testing MT4’s rich editor that I realised just how good TinyMCE is. MT4 produces some real garbage HTML underneath, doesn’t let you edit the properties of images you’ve placed such as the CSS class or style you’d like to apply to it (unless you switch to HTML view), doesn’t support tables (except with HTML view) and when creating a new post it doesn’t even surround the text with paragraph markers (unless you switch to HTML view) and you end up having lots of line breaks entered instead of paragraphs. These things may seem minor (and there are many more) but they’re annoying enough for me to not upgrade my installation. It’s the 21st century, I shouldn’t have to be hand-coding HTML to produce a basic, standard blog post about my hair or new football boots.

I have attempted to write a plug-in to get TinyMCE working with MT4 but haven’t managed it thus far – the entry editing page is quite different to the MT3 one and is proving rather tricky! Plus I’ve not really sat down and dedicated a lot of time to figuring it out.

I will say though that there are plenty of other slick features I like such as being able to create pages (a la WordPress), manage uploaded files (such as pictures) more easily, some more powerful template tags, finer-grained user permissions, better look-and-feel and just basically a more logically organised front-end. But until I manage to use a better WYSIWYG editor, I won’t be upgrading.

Which brings me onto WordPress. Many times over the years I’ve been tempted to migrate my site over to WordPress. It’s been ahead of MT for ages in terms of features and the fact that it’s written in PHP (which I know) rather than Perl (which I don’t and don’t particularly want to) makes me like it more. The latest version – 2.3 – has just been released and after installing it I’m impressed. The management pages are much faster than MT4’s, nicely laid out, and best of all – it uses TinyMCE for entry editing! I can quite easily write a plugin (plugins are incredibly simple to write since they’re PHP which I know as I said) to use the same options I use in TinyMCE on my current MT install. I’ve looked into migrating the content (pretty straightforward) as well as the layout (time consuming, but not hard) and maintaining the links structure so no links get broken and it’s mighty tempting.

Of course, you as a reader couldn’t care less, you see the output, not the tool that creates the site. “So why are you telling us about this John?” I hear you say – to which I reply that “you’ve got some attitude mister!”. Well I spend most of my time in Movable Type and very little of it actually browsing my own site, and you know what they say: a change is as good as a rest!

I know that the sensible choice is to just stick with what I’ve got now. It works and changing platform won’t really make any different to those reading my ramblings. Just because something is new and shiny doesn’t mean I should instinctively use it. But if I know me I’ll find myself sitting in my house on a rainy Sunday with nothing better to do and then port the lot to WordPress. Or maybe I’ll properly crack putting a decent editor into MT4. We shall see… And in Yorkshire most Sundays are rainy Sundays!