Is it time to make the switch back to WordPress?

Throughout its lengthy and lacklustre history, this site has burned through a number of content management systems. Movable Type was fun for a while, for example, and WordPress was a worthy successor.

Since January of 2009, I’ve been a loyal Textpattern user. It was my good friend Ram over at Funkaoshi – not to mention WTF TORY, since an election’s coming up – who turned me on to the platform. As an amateur PHP programmer who had more in mind for his site than a simple blog, I wanted more than WordPress 2.0 seemed able to provide. Ram recommended Textpattern, and the rest, as they say, is the uninspiring period between then and now.

Fans of the admittedly versatile Textpattern platform who happen to visit my site will no doubt spot the fact that I’m still using the default layout template. I know there’s a lot you can do with Textpattern, but it’s hardly the sort of CMS you can just jump into without a lot of study. And to be blunt, as far as I’ve seen, the designers haven’t shown a lot of interest in making the platform more accessible.

WordPress, in the meantime, introduced its own version 3.0 just a few months ago, and its design seems heavily influenced by the fact that people these days want more from a CMS than just an ordinary blog platform. I’ve had a number of opportunities to work with it; my wife and my brother use it on their sites, both of which I host as branches of my own account on Varial. I’ve also convinced my company to adopt it as the platform for our new website, which we’re hoping to launch later this year.

Textpattern, in the meantime, seems like it’s fallen behind by failing to move forward. My personal site’s the only site I manage that requires me to work with Textpattern, and because I’ve got a bunch of reasons to get more familiar with WordPress as it is, I’m thinking it’s time to make the switch and drop Textpattern from the equation altogether.

If you should happen to visit this site in the near future and discover a totally different layout, or even a totally different content structure and new features, then that’ll be the reason why. The feed address might change as well, and if it does, I’ll do my best to let this blog’s subscribers know as soon as I’m able.

The more I think about switching to a new platform – even just an impressive new version of an old platform – the more I feel like it’s time. What do you think?

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