WordFnord.
I don’t like WordPress.
It’s not that I haven’t tried to like it, but it occurred to me yesterday that the weblog system I use should not be another source of frustration in my life. Hey, I think the new site looks good, but behind the scenes, the inner workings are just not cut out for my intentions. It’s not the weblog’s fault. It wasn’t designed for the stuff I’m asking it to do. But what I realized yesterday is that I can either keep asking it to do things for which it wasn’t designed, or I can get a weblog system that already is designed that way.
I poked fun at the “uber-expensive” ExpressionEngine weblog system in a previous post, but after installing the 14-day trial version on this here server only this morning, I am already hooked. The damn thing has got everything I want. And it’s well-built and doesn’t require me to hack a single damn line of core code in any file to get exactly what I’m expecting. Its template system is much like pMachine’s, but much more robust—you can actually use PHP in a template. Hello, custom entry statuses! I’ve long wanted to flag certain entries as “only visible by a select group of members,” and with EE, I can do that. I tried doing it with WordPress, and while it worked admirably, it caused the number of SQL queries per page to shoot up to 100. Unbelievable, that is. When I turned on query output, I couldn’t believe my eyes—the same damn query, made time and time again. Absurd! But, again, like much of the other features on this site, the per-entry security settings was a hack. With EE, it’s…well, okay, it’s also a hack, but it’s a hack written by the program author—and, in utilizing PHP at the template level, you can query the security level before you ever query the database.
Now, the problem: ExpressionEngine is $149. Yeeeeaahhh. Well, as fate would have it, who should email me this morning but the Bikini Website Guy™. Seems he has some work he needs done. Well then, off we go—and ExpressionEngine, here I come. Just get me the work quickly, dude, so I can finish it quickly, and bill you quickly. Please.
In the meantime, I’m considering doing a full revert back to the 2.0 version of Oddball Update, the one driven by pMachine. The reason being that ExpressionEngine has a really rocking pMachine import tool, but no love for WordPress whatsoever. I’d like to be able to continue to post on my site without incurring a buttload of work for myself later, so I may just undo all this work I’ve done for a time. Sorry about the constant turmoil. But lucky for me that I saved all of the original database tables, eh? I’ll just re-upload the old shizz and we’ll be going BACK…TO THE FUTURE! (…Uh, no. Just back. To the…backup.)
But this new design stays. To quote the shapeshifting Shatner from Star Trek VI, “I like it here.”
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