Well, I did it. Over the end of December, 2009, holiday break I took about 15 hours to do what I considered a much needed website reorganization.
Here are the highlights:
- Modified my WordPress theme to have printing CSS support and a two column full page PHP template.
- Split the website into two WordPress installations, one for the older, archived blog material and one for the current blog.
- Moved all pages that were in Drupal into the new WordPress installation and set up .htaccess redirects for all the old Drupal pages. While Drupal is still present, all access attempts to pages should go to the new WordPress pages. In a few months I’ll delete the Drupal installation as I have no further plans for it.
- Started moving auxiliary files like images and Mint into more standardized locations higher up in the site hierarchy. The rest of the work on this is lower priority and will be done as time permits over the next few months.
- Started cleaning up the archived blog and adding some links to the current blog. The widgets used in the new and archived blog are similar, but the latter is simpler and encourages people to go to the new blog. I’ve greatly extended the time that entries in the archived blog are cached.
Aside: I find it really annoying to find errors in old blog entries. I wish someone had mentioned them if they had seen them.
I’ve talked elsewhere about some of my frustrations with using both WordPress and Drupal on this site. It was a worthy experiment to learn both technologies but, in the end, I was able to make WordPress do everything I wanted, with a few caveats (see below).
Why did I do this? I found …
- … it untenable to have two content management systems with two similar but different themes. Now I can use WordPress and the same theme for both installations, any employ WordPress plugins. I may use different plugins, but at least they have the same technology base.
- … that I was spending more time fiddling with my CMSs (content management systems) and not enough time creating new content, blog or otherwise.
- … the size of the older WordPress installation (over 3000 entries and 3000) comments was making it excruciatingly slow to work with, even with caching.
What else does WordPress need to be useful for page-based content management?
- Built-in support for wide pages for non-blog content in themes.
- Built-in CSS support for printing (and eventually mobile styles) in themes.
- Page hierarchy navigation at least as good as but preferably much better than what Drupal has.
- Anything else that I’ve complained about before. (grin)
Finally some words of advice to the Drupal community: You really need to provide exemplary import of WordPress blogs if you want to move more people to your platform, no matter how many others are adopting it (e.g., the White House). You shouldn’t say it’s non-core, you shouldn’t say “somebody in the community will do it if they want to,” you need to make it easy, complete, and elegant. I know there are some import modules out there, but unless you can handle things like intra-blog links, automatic category and tag taxonomy creation, and generated redirects from the WordPress structure to the new Drupal structure, you won’t get people to move sizable blogs over.
That said, if I were starting from scratch I would certainly consider using Drupal, but WordPress is not only an excellent blogging platform, it is becoming a very capable CMS. It works for me.
This may sound crazy, but after revamping my little blog last year, the one thing I did was simply archive posts per annum by providing a ZIP file link, and leaving the most popular posts up. For me, after a couple of years out, that’s a safe thing to do.
Not sure it would work for the sutor.com domain, since you have it well organized and divided among essays, books, blog, photography, Second Life, etc. The content would still be there, just packed up and tucked away.
Zaine, I get lots of hits on the old stuff, so I’m not sure what I would zip up. I’ll see how this works out, though the fear is always that readers won’t follow me to the new blog location. Since the majority of my hits are from Google, things should work out in the long run.
@bob_sutor, You’ve prompted me to reflect why I still use Drupal (in addition to WordPress), although I prefer and recommend WordPress to almost everyone else.
(1) I take notes — I call them digests — in HTML (now using Amaya, having become frustrated with certain quirks in Kompozer. I recognize that most people would probably fire up Microsoft Word to take notes, but it’s easier to import HTML into word processors, than export from a word processor to clean HTML.
With HTML as my common editing language, I find that WordPress takes a more active approach to markup — e.g. removing paragraph tags, substituting characters — than I would like. I tried (and decided against) substituting the WordPress implementation of TinyMCE with a FCKEditor for WordPress plugin, and would otherwise be left with handcoding HTML. I’ve found Drupal to be considerable less intrusive in the editing. That being said, I really do recommend WordPress over Drupal for the majority of people who would never fuss with coding HTML.
(2) I’ve now become a fan of the Drupal book module for creating structure between documents. Automatically creating hierarchical structure, as well as “previous” and “back” navigation is something that I would otherwise have to code manually. (Think about trying to get from the last page of Chapter 1 to the first page of Chapter 2). This really is a separation of content from form, that isn’t natural in WordPress.
I really do wish that Drupal was as friendly and easy to install as WordPress. However, I started with Drupal 4.7, and am now at Drupal 5 (with a friend having updated the current theme for me, when I get time to migrate the site to Drupal 6). Since I’ve been blogging since 2005, I would have started with WordPress 1.5 and am now (almost) current at WordPress 2.8. I certainly write a lot more content on WordPress than on Drupal. Drupal, designed more directly as a multi-user systems, is more complicated … which is sometimes a good thing.
I tend to not write pages in WordPress, and I don’t blog in Drupal. I do see how having two content management systems can add to work, but I’m really not pushing Drupal to is limits, so being downlevel is still okay by me.
David, I’ve turned off the visual editor in WordPress because I got tired of it mucking with the format, as you mentioned. In particular, some things like iframes it just deletes entirely. I’m going to poke around and see if there are some improvements for the HTML editor there. Several versions ago I had added some things myself, but those went away when I decided myself to stop mucking with the core files.