I Sort of Miss WordPress

Yeah, I hate to say this, but for a while I’ve had the impres­sion that the best is the ene­my of the good when it comes to blog­ging soft­ware and con­tent man­age­ment frame­works. From a pure­ly tech­ni­cal stand­point, switch­ing Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look from Word­Press to Dru­pal was a leap for­ward. Dru­pal is robust and flex­i­ble and allows for brand new con­tent types to be built. It’s mod­u­lar and the vari­ety of exist­ing add-ons is fan­tas­tic. The tax­on­o­my sys­tem allows for slic­ing and dic­ing one’s con­tent in an unlim­it­ed num­ber of ways.

Word­Press is a kick-ass blog­ging pack­age, no doubt about it. I’d rec­om­mend it to pret­ty much any­one. It’s easy to main­tain and has a good vari­ety of add-ons itself. Those add-ons have some lim­its though. Word­Press has one datatype: blog post. You can make exten­sions, but they always seem to be blog posts dressed up as book reviews, cal­en­dar events or what­not. Word­Press has also made their key­word sys­tem much more pow­er­ful, but it still falls short of Dru­pal’s tax­on­o­my system.

There’s a price to be paid for Dru­pal’s pow­er. That price is com­plex­i­ty. I saw all the pow­er and flex­i­bil­i­ty and start­ed plan­ning out all the great stuff I’d do with Dru­pal. The end result is that I spend more time devel­op­ing fea­tures that are just out of reach and don’t quite work unless I put anoth­er X num­ber of hours into it, and less time actu­al­ly writ­ing content.

Back when I was on Live­Jour­nal, there was no ques­tion about cre­at­ing new reusable datatypes. I just wrote and called it a day. Heck, half the time I just emailed my posts in with­out any thought to tag­ging or cat­e­go­riza­tion or any sort of lay­out options. When I switched to Word­Press I got a lot more con­trol, but I nev­er had so much that I felt out of control.

Today using Dru­pal, I dread log­ging in to the admin­is­tra­tion page, because I know that it will tell me that I have missed the last four ver­sion upgrades that have come out in the last two months, each one a crit­i­cal secu­ri­ty update. I dread see­ing that because the upgrade process for Dru­pal is painful. It con­sists of:

1. Back up everything
2. Take the site offline
3. Make a list of all add-on modules
4. Deac­ti­vate each one of these modules
5. Un-tar the dis­tri­b­u­tion into a new directory
6. One by one, rein­stall each mod­ule that had been deac­ti­vat­ed in step 4. Most of these will have to be down­loaded fresh and their install/upgrade instruc­tions followed.
7. Copy con­fig­u­ra­tion files from back­up to the new distribution
8. Run the upgrad­er script
9. Run the data­base upgrade script
10. Reen­able the rein­stalled mod­ules one by one, being care­ful to watch out for depen­den­cies or changed ver­sions that have new names
11. Bring the site back online.
12. Scream in ter­ror, hav­ing dis­cov­ered that the upgrade from ver­sion 6.7 to ver­sion 6.8 has made the site’s theme com­plete­ly bro­ken and it will take days of hack­ing CSS files to get it back to the way it was before, if it ever will go back.

After this kind of a process, do you think I have any ener­gy left for writ­ing blog posts? Hell no! The last thing I want to do after doing this is do any­thing else with the blog. No, once this is com­plete, I log off and don’t get my courage up to attack the blog for anoth­er two weeks, when I’ll log in think­ing about some­thing to write only to dis­cov­er that anoth­er crit­i­cal secu­ri­ty update has been issued.

Rinse. Lath­er. Repeat.

So I nev­er have any ener­gy for writ­ing and I cer­tain­ly don’t have any ener­gy to do devel­op­ment. Espe­cial­ly not to devel­op mod­ules that will be inevitably bro­ken by a crit­i­cal secu­ri­ty update. Instead of a pret­ty good site with new con­tent every cou­ple of days, I have a poten­tial­ly amaz­ing site that looks ter­ri­ble, does­n’t work well, and nev­er gets updated.

I hate to blame my lack of cre­ative out­put on soft­ware, but here the choice of soft­ware I’ve made real­ly has got­ten in the way. I would have been bet­ter off swear­ing at Word­Press’ lim­i­ta­tions than I am try­ing to keep up with Dru­pal’s advancements.