For the past several months I’ve been going back and forth installing, configuring, and uninstalling various frameworks, blogging platforms, and content management systems, all with the goal of setting up a site to house my portfolio, blog, and resume. I’ve finally decided to stick with Wordpress and it seemed appropriate for my first official post to rehash the steps I took to arrive here.
Initially, I was planning to work with an MVC framework, more specifically CakePHP, which I had seen used to build a custom blog platform by Jonathan Snook. I began building a simple structure in CakePHP, all the while researching alternative frameworks. I eventually came to a point where I felt that CakePHP was trying to introduce a bit too much of its “automagic” functionality and I didn’t have control over certain aspects of my web application (Looking back now I imagine that this was probably due to my lack of experience with CakePHP. If I had taken the time to dig around I’m sure I could have circumvented or integrated CakePHP into whatever it was I was trying to accomplish).
Before dropping MVC frameworks entirely, I researched a few others, namely CodeIgniter, Zend, and Symfony. While I liked the simplicity and flexibility of CodeIgniter, I ultimately decided that using an MVC framework for this project was going to take significantly longer than I intended to get a site up and running and I figured it was time to start looking into pre-packaged solutions. I went through several of the major players including Wordpress, Textpattern, and MovableType, and while researching these, I caught wind of ExpressionEngine via Marc Amos’s mention on Twitter. I decided to give ExpressionEngine a try since there seemed to be quite a bit of praise from the freelance developer/designer community and in my mind it was the underdog (ExpressionEngine is also developed by the same company that’s behind CodeIgniter, EllisLab).
My first installation of ExpressionEngine went very smoothly, and I didn’t hit a single snag until I needed to decide how to structure my data groups, or “weblogs” in ExpressionEngine lingo. There ended up being a bit of a learning curve with ExpressionEngine, and I needed to adapt to a new tag system, but once I started to pick it up it turned out to be an amazing web application. The one problem I had with ExpressionEngine was that all templates had to be entered via the web interface. Of course they could be edited elsewhere then copied and pasted, but it really broke my natural workflow. I like being able to work directly with the code in an editor such as TextMate, then hit a few hotkeys and have the changes live on the site. There really didn’t seem to be any other major drawbacks with ExpressionEngine, but I just didn’t feel comfortable managing my own site with it (If I were setting up a site for someone else, I think ExpressionEngine would make a great content management system).
At this point, several months had passed and I had nothing but a blank white page for a website. I needed something that was quick and simple to setup, used familiar technology, and wouldn’t get in my way if I wanted to tweak or customize it. That’s when I finally settled on Wordpress. I had toyed around with Wordpress in the past and setup blogs for friends and family, so I knew I could have it up and running in minutes. I searched for a theme to act as a placeholder, found “itheme”, and decided that would be my starting point.
I’m still not 100% sure that Wordpress is the best or most efficient solution for what I want to accomplish, and I’m sure before too long I’ll write a “Wordpress vs. ExpressionEngine vs. Whatever” post, but for the time being, Wordpress is allowing me to build, blog, and slowly expand on my portfolio site without complication.