Choosing a CMS
A few months ago I registered this domain with a view to setting up a small website to document a few of my on-off projects, maybe generating a bit of publicity for them, while at the same time providing informative articles that might help someone. The tricky part was choosing a content management system.
Generally there are two paths that can be taken when creating a website, develop your own templating script, or use a package such as Drupal or Wordpress (now in use here). I like to think that I’m fairly good at PHP, so jumped straight in at the deep end and began hacking together my own basic website templating engine; nothing too advanced was needed - just a way to keep pages in a hierarchy. As you can probably tell, this quickly fell to pieces; my interest in programming it started dipping and I was left with yet another half finished project - I just wanted to start writing some content.
A while ago I made a website for an open source project using Drupal as the primary application, this worked fairly well; the community was fairly large which meant that anything less powerful would have quickly been overrun and the administration overhead was fairly low. I had gained a fair bit of knowledge regarding how it could be administered and effectively used, so installed it to try it out as a personal site. The vast amount of configuration required was quite daunting, and much more than one needed for a small personal site (even if the hierarchical page organisation scheme is one of the best available). It was quickly scrapped and I moved back to developing a new custom templating engine.
Again, this soon stalled, so I looked into alternative content management systems; Wordpress is a fantastic engine, but the theme editor lets it down (I wasn’t too fond of the administration interface that I remember it having, either). The last time I’d used it was about a year ago, so I thought that it might be worth a trial (Sean Whitton managed to convinced me that “it’s fantastic.”) - and at this point I was getting desperate; my complex hierarchy system design had evaporated and a blog would suffice for what I now wanted. After installing it, I was amazed at how sleek it now was, far from the clunky interface it had previously; it’s a pleasure to use and I’m grateful I chose to reevaluate it.
This blog is still a work-in-progress, although I aim to update it fairly regularaly with small articles on specific topics and my current projects, so hopefully it won’t fall in to demise. The next major thing to do is have a go at making a theme, hopefully this will be easier than one would expect.