It is spring again, and I am getting carried away by that wind of change that gets me every year. Once again, I am not satisfied with my website and I am ready to have some action in order to fix it.
After using Nucleus CMS for more slightly more than a year I got fed up with it. It seems that it is too flexible and modular for me.
Changing looks and feels by editing templates, skins, and files with stylesheets and blocks of sidebars is way too much. I would rather prefer less flexibility and more centralization. As things are, I always forget where I have to go to edit the output. There is also another issue with most of the stuff stored in the database instead of regular files. Plugins need to be reinstalled every time I edit them. This is not something that I am willing to do anymore.
Also having a huge pile of functionality in plugins rather than in the core has its drawbacks. Plugins are written by “other” people. Meaning that there is less quality control applied to plugins. And that there is version dependancy between plugins and the core software. This brings a lot of problems when upgrading the core. And I don’t want to fix the same problems over and over again.
Yet another issue I have with the user interface. The system is flexible and powerful, but the interface is by far from the well designed. As an example, consider settings. There are global settings for Nucleus installation, blog specific settings, user specific settings and plugin specific settings. All of these are all over the place and one has to remember what is where. Or browse through all of them. I don’t like it.
On top of my complaints toward Nucleus, I have a really pleasant experience with WordPress. User interface is clean and really thought-through. All the functionality that most people will use is in the core. Plugins are taking care of all the rest. It also features a better post editor, pinging tools, user management, and anti-spam utilities. There are also great improvements in the file uploading (thumbnailing, commenting, checking for dublicates and renaming).
Overall, WordPress seems like a much better system at the moment. In fact it seems so good that I can’t stand the fact of not using it. Thus, I will be switching to WordPress 1.5 in the next few days. It will take me some time to move all the posts from the last four years of my blogging. When it will be done, I will correct the obvious problems and will switch it to production.
One of the shortcomings that I can forsee from the change would be the links to posts. I have made a mistake with the structure of the permalinks. I will have to pay for it now. This will cause me a slight reduction in search engine and bookmark positions, but I am willing to do it anyway. If I got there once, I can get there again.
On the bright side, I will (finally!) fully standard compliant blog. Currently, there are still some problems with MS Internet Explorer and Konqueror. These should be fixed with the migration. I will also remove Google Ads from all pages of the blog and will leave it only for large articles, like “Vim for Perl developers” and “Practical RPM”. Maybe somewhere else too. But it will surely be gone from the main page.
So, please stay with me, while I pass this stage. I will keep you updated. You too please let me know of any misbehaviour that you might notice.
