So, I’m having another go at WordPress. The idea is to manage all the site’s text content with a single tool, replacing the blog’s current reliance on the rather-aged pMachine and my use of Dreamweaver for other text pages. I also want to make changes of emphasis, for example integrating in my Twitter posts which would once have become shorter blog items (even if that does mean bringing in the tweets that are more like IM or social networking). Some longer blog posts would work better as articles – for example my ever popular post on the perils of multiple Lightroom catalogues, or those where I’ve used the blog for plug-ins. WordPress is obviously suited to blog postings, and its Pages feature will accommodate my need for longer articles. So far, so good – I’m pretty impressed with WordPress’s flexibility.

A few things about what I’m doing. I decided I wanted something that looked lighter and more open – not my Joy Division default with everything “contained” within a centred, rectangular layout. I liked how the Arjuna theme from SRS uses rounded rectangles around sidebars and titles, so in the last day or two I’ve customised the theme extensively.

So my (Connemara) theme varies the header background for different site areas, and my tweets are shown in the blog sidebar. The photo galleries are done using WordPress pages which get images directly from SlideShowPro Director. These pages have a custom field called “album”, and are displayed using a custom WordPress page template which retrieves the album code (using the get_post_custom_values function) and uses Director’s API to add images to the page, resized and sharpened by the server. PHP then writes the thumbnail grid and CSS on the fly, and the Lightbox JavaScript is also integrated. I do love my PHP.

What do you think?

Yesterday one of the web sites I maintain had a big problem – lots of ugly PHP error messages about “eregi is deprecated” and we were locked out of the control panel, pMachines, that manages the site’s content. On the other hand, the hosting company was excellent, their reply being so quick that I initially thought it was a duplicate acknowledgement of my support request, and they didn’t pull the “what have you changed?” or “we don’t support user applications” tricks. They had changed the server over to PHP5 and had switched off PHP4 support. pMachines is no longer updated, so I bit the bullet and spent all day migrating everything to WordPress, copying the content and building a custom page template. And of course, just as I was ready to show off my labours, one of the site’s users discovered the original site was working properly again – the host had restored support for PHP4. Yes, I know, setting up WordPress was a learning experience. “Bugger”!

In fairness, my eagerness to make the changeover was because I was looking for a test bed. While I use pMachines to run this blog, and it is reliable-enough, it does show its age. Character encoding is messy and pasted material regularly screws up one RSS reader or another, posts can’t be in more than one category, and it’s a stretch when one (mis)uses pMachines to manage parts of a site other than the blog. So I’ve been looking at alternatives.

I’m a little wary of WordPress after a friend used it to set up a blog which was then hacked, compromising his forum – and I’m the one who maintains that. pMachine is old and too small a target for hackers. WordPress though….

But yesterday’s experience was much more encouraging. The site isn’t really a continuing blog, and WordPress’s Pages feature worked well as a basic content management system for a collection of independent pages – we’re not even using its blog features. Especially nice was cutting the original site’s page contents from a browser window and pasting them into WordPress’s page entry form which nicely picked up all the formatting. This made light work of converting the site’s 21 pages.

Whether it will be so easy to convert this site is another matter. However, the links from migrating from pmachine to wordpress look helpful and certain principles of data migration always remain. When you want to get data into a new system – whether it’s masses of financial or business data or simply Lightroom keyword – you begin by exporting dummy data from the new system because you can usually be sure it’ll import it properly. Then see if you can get your existing data into that format. Never start from what you have – start from where you want to be.