Walter Hutchens’ Blog

I’ve been using WordPress for about three weeks now. My impressions thus far include the following.

An apparent lack of themes and a spell-checker were two of my initial complaints about WordPress. I’ve scratched both issues off my list. I found a WordPress plug-in that spell-checks entries. I had a little trouble installing it, but now it works quite well.

I also learned that there are oodles of themes for WordPress, and one nice feature of WordPress is that it lets me change themes quite easily. With Blogger, my original tool for maintaining my web log, it is possible to change themes, but the process isn’t nearly as smooth as it is with WordPress. With Blogger when I selected a new theme I had to re-publish the entire blog to see it. That re-publishing process took minutes. By contrast, with WordPress I can flip between themes instantly. There is even a WordPress plug-in that allows visitors to a site to flip between themes and choose they one they’d like to see when they return.

The support forums and codex documentation for site WordPress are also quite good.

I’ve imported into my WordPress site the many entries I had created with Blogger plus the few entries I created with TypePad. I like having everything in one place, and I like that WordPress allows me to password protect specific entries.

But there are some things I do not like about WordPress. One problem is that WordPress is not set-up to support multiple blogs with a single WordPress installation. As I recently wrote, I want to create one site with just my entries on PRC securities regulation while maintaining a more general blog that will include those entries and a variety of other stuff. I did not do this with Blogger, but Blogger does easily allow one to keep multiple blogs through a single interface, which is something WordPress does not yet do.

A second frustration I have with WordPress is that it doesn’t allow me to easily add photos to my blog entries. By contrast, Blogger is well integrated with Picasa. Both Blogger and Picasa are Google products, and they work together quite well. I use Picasa to maintain thousands of photos on my hard drive, and I could post one to my blog maintained with Blogger with just a few clicks. TypePad, which is a product of SixApart, not Google, was not tightly integrated with Picasa, but it did allow me to easily pick an image from my hard drive and insert it into a blog entry with just a few clicks. When I did that, I could choose for the image to be set to the left or right margin, and TypePad would automatically create a thumbnail for the image and upload the full size version so that when someone clicked on the small version in the blog entry the large version would be displayed. TypePad also put in the code to have text flow around the image.

Finally, I found it very easy to modify a template in Blogger, but I’ve not yet changed a WordPress template. Of course it can be done, but Blogger makes it obvious how to do so.

Aside from these things, I’ve been happy with WordPress overall.