Wednesday, December 31, 2008

My Experiments with WordPress

I had never dreamt of working with WordPress. But yeah, you should know not all dreams happen. Humm, I had been working with WP for now more than a months. I was surprised myself when it ranked as one of the popular sites that I visit. Well, this is not a post to compare WordPress with a superior blogging platform like blogger. Just an review in my terms. There were different kinds of users whom I have observed during this experiment (Experienced to Rookie).

Home Page: Why do I need so many things squeezed into one front page. Hot VIP posts, Hot community post, Recommended page and universal tag. I was for a second confused if it was my home page. Cross verified when I saw a small text saying "Welcome back Vijesh".

WordPress is against the policy of "One Click", you at least need two clicks to do any action in WordPress. Only thing that works on one click is to view your blog. That's interesting.

The WYSWYG editor is neat and comprehensive. Few things that stand out are Full screen editing mode (One can always disguise his manager like typing on a editor.), Insert Custom Symbol with a Character map and easy upload of Media varying from image, audio and video. Also an 3GB storage limit is impressive to start with.

Stats: That's a good thing to have inside one's blogger portal. An automatic stats collector is good for beginners to know about it. Also the stats are cheap and simple. Not even near to other powerful stats engine. Anything for free is welcomed.

Privacy and comment moderation: Its usual stuff here were you can hide the blog from search engine and invite users to your blog. But roles like Contributor, Editor and Author are confusing. I wish they define each role in a tool tip. Since I don have time for twenty questions or patience to read the help. Comment moderation has become an important setting with most bloggers. The interface to moderate comment was cool in WordPress. (I loved clicking those 13 moderated comments, It was fun.)

Pages and Category: I got to accept this, Pages is one big feature I miss in Blogger. Its easy to add pages in WordPress. Did not experiment much on them. Category is good to organise the tags. But any real time purpose of it. I can't think of many.

Themes and Custom Header: Too many Thames to select from. When choices increase trouble increase. Custom Header was easy to make and change. It was specifically said the dimension the header has to be so that no cropping or re size is done. Good word there.

But over all on any good day or network, WordPress is heavy and slow. Its not a piece of cake for my Dad or Mom. I wont recommend it for beginners. Either you live in Ireland or India try hard its still not like my love. Now its all said and done, I can sit back and relax...

Here are some of the user testimonials,
- aree whats happening, why is it reacting like this?
- hey wait, be patient and why do you want to click on that so many times.
- Now, what to do?
- Where is it?
- Sorry, I was not able to create a login!

Update: I did not try feature of password protected post. :P Ah! How did I miss that, or rather what will I do doing that.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That that people! Their their choices! (Avaa avaalukku avaa avaa ishtam). As a technically challeneged person, I still think Blogger is too much of a headache and I find it easier with Wordpress.

Hmph! And this post looked like a total bash ONLY for me. What with u mentioning about Ireland and all :D

Vijesh said...

I still cant accept the fact that Blogger is technically challenging you! My Mom is able to write a post on her own. That's enough to convince me that any one can do it.

No nothing really on you Irish girl. :)

Abirami Rajendran said...

haha,idhai thaan "neram" nnu solradhu.After all your WP bashing,you had to create one paatheengala :D

Blogger is way better.No competition.

But for the pwd protection....sigh.

Vijesh said...

Yeah! People are important.
You know whats the first feature that I would work upon if I get into the blogger team. :)