Greg Crisp

Today’s post is part of a group project for the Atlanta Bloggers group.  

I left Mambo as a CMS because: 1) it’s too complex for most uses, and 2) I ran in to major quality problems with many of the plugins I was using on [former] customers’ web sites.

When I rebuilt my personal site, I chose to switch to Wordpress. Here’s why:

• Simplicity: The Wordpress administration interface is very clean and easy to use. The most used stuff [The blog] is easy to find, and the options are not overly complicated. Related to this, I was able to find a good number of minimalist themes, including the one I chose: Hemingway Reloaded.
• Stability: There is a community dedicated to the platform, plus a large number of plugins. Also, the base code and plugins seem to be stable, at least more so than what I encountered on the Mambo platform. When something does break due to an update, the system seems to do a decent job of detecting the problem and turning off the offending part.
• Language: I want to modify and enhance the system. Wordpress is built on PHP and MySQL, both of which I know. I briefly considered Movable Type, since it seems to also have a large community, but it’s based on Perl, I have neither time nor desire to update that knowledge base.

There were other minor reasons, including an API for offline editing, but these were the primary factors that drove me to Wordpress. I reserve the right to change my mind later.