WordPress, it’s been a great ride. Honestly it has. We’ve been together for what — five, almost six years now after you opened your arms to me when SixApart started charging for MovableType*. It hasn’t always been a smooth relationship (I still haven’t quite forgiven you for that ish with WordPress.com), but like all relationships we learned to take the good with the bad.
I’ll always love you like a play cousin**, WordPress, but it’s time I moved on.
MPOW runs its website on ExpressionEngine. It’s a huge installation, and I can’t ever forsee this site becoming as large as what we’re running there. Part of my responsibilities at work is to train staff on using ExpressionEngine to create content for the library’s website, and what kind of bogus trainer would I be if I didn’t practice what I preached?
The most daunting part of WordPress for me was my inability to hack together a theme I was happy with. I would either use default themes, free themes I found elsewhere, or paid themes (like this one) because I was afraid of touching the underlying PHP that made WordPress work. ExpressionEngine removes that fear, because it has one of the simplest (yet most powerful) templating and tagging systems I’ve ever worked with. All I had to do was hack together a simple CSS-based design and drop in a few EE tags, and my front page was done.
If you’re considering moving to ExpressionEngine, be aware that it isn’t free. Ordinarily I’m all about the free, but I consider EE a professional investment. You can download a free core version that will give you some basic weblog functionality, but if you want a more robust system, you’ll have to pay the license fee. Also, if you want to quickly learn how the system works and how to paste together a fairly complex site, I highly recommend the EE Screencasts by Ryan Irelan. Ryan has quite a lot of experience with EE, and his easy, conversational style gives you the confidence to start working with EE right away.
I don’t have a specific timeline for this migration, but I’m hoping to have a functional site complete before SXSWi in March. I’ll probably document my progress here as well, so keep an eye out for that.
* It’s (mostly) free now, in case you hadn’t heard.
** I told you I was going to bring this phrase back.
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