WordPress is a nice piece of kit; from the smooth, simple, “5 minute install” to the ease of creating themes, I’ve found myself impressed by the way the creators anticipated exactly what I wanted from it. Of course, I’m editorialising somewhat, but I’ve found that particularly well designed software often seems as though it was made just for you.

WordPress is a “semantic personal publishing platform”—in other words, blog software. I’ve worked with both Textpattern and Movable Type, and while they both have advantages, WordPress combines what I feel are the best points of both.

Movable Type has the advantage of a good interface, and while WordPress’ interface has its own quirks, it’s essentially straightforward and powerful. Textpattern’s interface, on the other hand, is awful. The nomenclature is confusing, and the learning curve is extremely steep. Wordpress and MT are much easier to work with; WP especially so.

MT, however, runs on Perl, which has attendant problems; WordPress and Textpattern, on the other hand, are PHP-based. PHP has three major advantages. Firstly, it’s installed on most web servers wheras Perl support is more limited. Secondly, it’s easy to install on a desktop, which means it’s easier to test. This ties into my third point, which is that while my knowledge is limited, I do have some vague idea of how PHP works—enough, at any rate, to manipulate WordPress theme files.

The theme creation system is the best of the three. Textpattern is extremely powerful, but it doesn’t have the drag-and-drop functionality of Wordpress’ theme creation system, which requires (at its most basic) only one file, and a new folder in the right place. It detects new themes automatically, and switching themes is just a matter of clicking on the theme in the admin interface.

My own theme, ‘Stamps’, was created to slot in with my existing site, and so far I think it’s working pretty well, although there’s a way to go with it still. So far it consists of an index page, header, footer, sidebar, single entry page and bare-bones archive. If there are ‘missing’ files for the theme, WordPress will simply pull them from the default theme. They won’t look wonderfully pretty, but it means that you can develop a theme piece by piece (as I am) with good results. Currently the comments section is unstyled and ugly, but it’s there and it works, which isn’t to be sniffed at.

Lastly, we come to documentation, without which all my theme development efforts would have been far harder. The WordPress documentation is incomplete and occasionally fragmented, but what’s there—mainly in the WordPress Codex—is excellent: clear, concise, with plenty of helpful examples. After the obliqueness of Movable Type documentation and the dearth of good Textpattern articles (although if you do decide to go with it, let me recommend Kusor’s TXP Tags Manual and Joel Dueck’s ‘Textpattern Semantics’), the WP Codex is a breath of fresh air. I hope to contribute to it when I have a bit more time.

All in all, I believe that WordPress is the best personal publishing software out there, especially for those who are just getting started with blogging (or are switching from a service such as Blogger or LiveJournal to a site of their own). There are some great ready-made templates out there: the WP 1.5 install comes with Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick installed as standard, and Theron Parlin’s WP adaptation of Douglas Bowman’s ‘Minima’ Blogger theme, MinimaPlus is very classy (unfortunate headers aside, it can even make the websites of aesthetically impaired people quite nice). I found kingcosmonaut’s beautifully textured site through the Web Standards Awards, and Blix is a WordPress theme he’s made.

Everyone seems to be getting in on the act; who knows, I might make one myself! As a matter of fact, I like the software so much that once I get the templates for this site finished (as far as things like this are ever finished), I’ll be starting work on another WordPress-powered project. But that’s another entry.