hans.gerwitz

After some prodding from Ryan and a note­worthy adoption by Zeldman, I recently checked out the latest version of WordPress. Since my last survey, it has grown into a quite capable site management platform. Every one of my use cases is addressable through existing plugins, and there is a vibrant ecosystem centered on WordPress as a platform.

I have a few complaints about the tech­nical archi­tecture and imple­men­tation details of the product… but that no longer drives my selection.

So, I’ve decided to switch. I’ve spent a few days migrating content, config­uring, and trying out a few plugins. Everything is just so easy in WordPress, I’ve begun to think of it as the Macintosh of personal site tools.

SnipSnap was like using Windows. There was a lot of potential there, and a lot of users making it do wonderful things, but every step felt like a battle against ancient design deci­sions on a platform whose authors don’t really care about it.

XWiki reminded me of FreeBSD (or Linux)… robust, flexible, and ready for you to build whatever you want. An active user community and smart devel­opers wait to help you build your dream tools. But if you want to do anything, you’ve got some serious learning to do first. Someday, they’ll get around to slapping on some of that “usability” paint that’s the rage these days.

WordPress reminds me of Mac OS Classic (9). The tech­nology is dated, and stability depends on a lot of third-​​party code playing nicely with each other. Nonetheless, the devel­opment community is lively enough to provide every­thing you need, and is judged by a sophis­ti­cated user audience that will not embrace kludgey inter­faces. In the end, it just works.

It may not be the OS X of its market yet, but it has a chance of getting there. The live­liness of the WordPress ecosystem brings me confi­dence that when some Ruby-​​based replacement comes and takes the torch, that I’m now in the main­stream and will benefit with migration tools, func­tion­ality ports, etc. The recent Jobsian fasci­nation with simplicity (version 2 has a smaller feature set than its prede­cessor) offers tremendous comfort that I won’t find myself wrestling to extract my own data again next year.