littled.net

After being a bit dissatisfied with my site for a while and not having the time to redesign it, I’ve decided to overhaul it with a minimum amount of work, namely:

• Making Wordpress my site’s CMS and moving away from “static” PHP pages that had to be edited via Dreamweaver
• Installing an existing Wordpress theme for my site’s design

I’m pleased with the result I have to say. It will make it much easier for me to edit content on the site which means it’s much less likely to get out of date.

I like the theme I’m using: Cutline. It’s nice and clean and the kind of thing I had in mind when I was thinking about a redesign. I haven’t done anything to customise it, save putting in a few of my own images but I’m pretty much happy with it as it is.

I’ve got a few things planned, particularly with the new “Offline” section which I’ll use to highlight my non-web interests. I’m working on producing a nice Flash-based photo gallery to supercede my old PHP Flickr one but it might take a while to get going as it’s not a very high priority for me at the moment.

A few redirects means that old pages should redirect to their newer equivalents. I’m keeping my “new” site in a separate subfolder so I can still have directories outside of Wordpress to play around with various things.

The version of Wordpress I’m using is 2.5.1 and whilst I didn’t find all of it immediately intuitive, I’ve managed to get the site up and running with reasonably little effort. Compare that to the amount of work it takes to get a Plone site working! Well, Wordpress and Plone are two very different beasts, but I think Plone could learn a lesson or two from how much easier it is to theme Wordpress.

Another thing I like about the newer Wordpress is the page editor: bar some minor annoyances, it was pretty good in the older version I was using but the new one has buttons for embedding media which means no more resorting to hacking in the HTML then losing it next time you edit the page. Nice one.