As you can probably see, I’ve change the site quite substantially. It’s quite a big move, overall.
I’ve dropped Zope in favour of WordPress. Zope has been fine for my own software, but for blogging, it sucks. The blog software that’s available for Zope is pretty unfriendly, slow to be updated, hard to install and use, and generally full of FAIL. My experience with WordPress so far (less than 24 hours) is that it’s awesome.
WordPress is super easy to install. It has plenty of functionality right out of the box; lots of stuff that’s become de rigeur in the blogging world. Zope? Good luck.
WordPress has a strong modular setup, and a large install base. This has resulted in a lot of themes and plugins that you can download and use. Again, installing them is easy. They’re full of funky Web 2.0 AJAX and nice interface aspects.
WordPress is just easier to use. So many people have come to depend on the software that I’m confident that it’s robust, feature rich (with the features people want to use!) and well maintained. Continuing to punish myself with Zope just wasn’t worth it. I don’t have time to write my own blogging software, I just want to blog!
The clincher for me was the ease of migration. WordPress can import from an amazing array of other blogging platforms, and it understood RSS. I just dumped my old Zope blog posts out in RSS format, and sucked them in with WordPress. Super easy.
So here we are. I’ve done a minimum of customisation of the current theme so far. No doubt I’ll make further updates as I figure out how it all works.
Oh, and now I have tags. Yay!