When I first thought of launching a blog of my own, I decided to research into available scripts and tools and see if anything surpassed WordPress in quality. I’d encountered a few subtle bugs in WordPress while working for my clients, so I wanted an alternative.

One of my friends sent me his commercial script for testing. He talked a lot about its benefits, but after a few hours of struggling with simple tasks (which take 5 minutes to solve in WP) I said no, thanks. Even the best product built by a solitary programmer can never beat something created by a team, so I looked into a directory of free scripts and soon found a couple of leading blog scripts built by teams. One of them seemed popular and had on its website a list of blogs powered by it. I visited those links one by one – only to discover that some of those blogs no longer existed, and the rest of them had been moved to WordPress.

I have set up a blog using Drupal – but Drupal is too heavy for a single blog, and lacks certain features. For example, its default comment form doesn’t allow your visitors to insert their website URLs. Unregistered visitors can’t enter their names either. And besides, setting up a blog takes more time than with WordPress.

So I gave up. My blog is powered by WordPress – as is this one. I’ve customised the theme, of course – modified it greatly, so nobody will ever recognise the original theme downloaded by me for free. I’ve also installed a few plugins – the necessary minimum: one for SEO, one for captcha and one for social bookmarking. WP’s subtle bugs have spared my blog so far (fingers crossed), but I’ve had more than one opportunity to appreciate the benefits of this particular script: flexibility, availability of good plugins for nearly every purpose, relatively small size of the script itself and intuitive admin interface. It also generates valid HTML code, which is an important consideration for a web perfectionist like me.

Irina has blogged 4 posts here.

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