Menace

Monday, 11th September 2006, No Comments »

How I chose Menace’s Content Management System

Both Tim and Tim asked the day Menace launched if I was using Mephisto, sadly no, it’s plain old Wordpress. But I thought I might go into why I picked Wordpress over any others.

• Hosting
  I currently host with Webdrive, I have for the past 5 years and their service is fantastic, but they only host PHP/PERL or Microsoft servers at present, no ruby on rails support. The WellRailed group has talked about hosting options in NZ, but no real gems popped out.
• Functionality
  Not a lot seperates most blogging systems really, but it’s the little things that kill, for example Expression Engine and Text Formatting.
• Community/Support
  Wordpress has a few years worth of questions, answers, plugins and howtos. This is ultimately a maturity thing of both the CMS and technology that runs it. I say this not to bash the new comers or to claim PHP is any better (oh it’s not), but because rails programmers themselves are still having to work-out best practices (freeze apps before doing an update) or things they shouldn’t be doing anymore.
• Hackability
  I know enough Ruby on Rails to be dangerous, I know PHP enough to be really good at it.

One day I will more than likely change the CMS here, but it’ll only be based on reevaluating my needs and going from there. Really I’m not that overly impressed with Wordpress especially it’s plugin architecture (one plugin I installed breaks some core Wordpress stuff - this is bad) but it does what I need it to do for the time being.