MINIsOnTop

I”ve spent some amount of time this last week experimenting with WordPress, achieving my goal of moving the MINIsOnTop site over:

Why? Well …
In the past, one person has been in charge of updating MINIsOnTop; unfortunately that person is sometimes busy with “real life”! By moving over to WordPress, we can have it set up so that a number of “authors” can post to the site – this will spread the load and should make for quicker updates.

I’m reasonably impressed by WordPress so far, compared to MovableType which I use for GBMINI & GPMINI.
When I started with weblogs, I used Blogger because it was very easy to get started. After reaching limits, I switched to MovableType which was a great choice.
Now though, WordPress is probably better than MovableType – primarily because of the huge amount of users supporting it with adaptions and extensions. There’s also a couple of features I particularly like that are available in WordPress but not MovableType:
– the ability to have “pages” as well as posts;
– the ability to “click back in time”.

“Pages” are any page that isn’t a time-related weblog entry, but you want it to look like the rest of your site. In MovableType, I use a “server side include” to fill in the right hand banner, so I get my “pages” to look similar to the weblog, but with WordPress it’s automatic and not just similar but the same.

With my weblogs, you can see the recent posts on the main page, you can click one of the “recent entries” links, or you can click “all entries”. With WordPress, there is an “earlier posts” or “next page” type of link available, which takes you “back in time” page by page through the posts. This feature works particularly well on weblogs with lots of regular updates, like Motoringfile (which is also running on WordPress).

There’s some stuff I’d still like to improve on the new MINIsOnTop – in particular it would be nice to integrate the Gallery – but it’s running so that’s good enough for now.
Will I change GBMINI & GPMINI? I don’t know – there’s no particular reason to change since everything works quite well; it would be nice to have that “earlier posts” feature though, and it looks like WordPress might be better for fighting spam comments these days …

(and thanks to DB for encouragement!)