Trigger Finger

Whilst playing with my new Sony Ericsson P990i today, I hit on yet another thing that impresses me about WordPress. So I thought it was worth a quick post to sing the praises of the engine of this blog.

I have played with a lot of content management systems over the years, Joomla/Mambo, various phpnukes and derivatives, and some commercial offerings at work. But none has given me so many ‘WOW it just works’ moments as WordPress.

Like most bloggers when I started up Trigger Finger, I was just looking for a quick way to get online, with a system that made it easy to post content and have the server look after formatting and organising it all for me. Nice to haves were extensability in terms of plugins from the community (and any I wanted to make for myself), open source, and as low maintenance as possible so I could concentrate on the important things in life WordPress ticked all these boxes and then some!

Examples are the set-up and configuration. Within 10 minutes of reading the readme I had the thing uploaded, installed and configured. Then I was easily able to find the plugins I have wanted for various things. Examples of those I use and have ‘just worked’ are Shortstats, Askimet, Digg-This, and I suppose I should consider the huge variety of themes as plugins too, of which all I have stumbled upon have been a very high quality and best of all … free!

But the reason for this gushing praise post today was that I was reminded of the unexpected nice to haves I have stumbled upon since (to which I have had zero input in) including those I have discovered since starting to use my new phone for surfing. The fact that RSS was up and running without a single click from me, the fact that the page renders really, really nicely on that tiny (compared to a PC) screen when so many big sites are a nightmare on a mobile phone, and the fact that I have been able to post this little piece from my mobile phone when in swedish-class due to the admin page using such good code and no crazy javascripts or flash modules!

Of course there are many others that could do such things, Joomla I am a huge fan of for instance and it’s fantastic for bigger projects. But for a simple blog it feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. WordPress does it much easier, with much less configuration and a huge amount of power that is easily unleashed through plugins and simple code changes.

I only have one complaint, when posting pure text like this post the editor is great, but when it comes to something like my previous post (Top 10 Windows Sidebar Vista Gadgets) it can be a real pain in the ass and I have to pull out an HTML editor to correct all the crazy things it got wrong. Here’s hoping it becomes truly WYSIWYG in the near future

Good work WordPress… long may it continue!

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