WordPress After 8 Months
Early this year, I switched from Movable Type to WordPress for my blog. I’ve been very happy with that decision. So I thought I’d give an update on how I feel after using WordPress for eight months.
First, I should say that the speed issue hasn’t bothered me like I thought it would. I haven’t added caching, but may still do so at some point. Let me know if things feel slow.
Second, I’ve changed the which plugins I use, so let me give you the current list.
- NEW — Twitter Friendly Links let’s me use my own domain for short URLs instead of Bit.ly or TinyURL.com
- NEW — RF Twitter Post will update Twitter when I write a new post. I’m testing this one and hoping the next version adds support for Twitter Friendly Links
- NEW — SexyBookmarks makes it easy for readers to share things they find interesting
- Aksimet filters comments from spammers of which there are many
- All in One Adsense and YPN handles the ads on my site though I have them turned off now
- FD Feedburner Plugin lets me use FeedBurner for my RSS feeds
- Google Analyticator adds the Google Analytics tracking code
- KB Robots.txt allows me to add my sitemap to my robots.txt file
- Markdown allows me to write using Markdown syntax
- Recently Popular highlights what posts people find interesting
- Simple Google Sitemap automatically creates a sitemap for me
- Twitter lets you know exactly what I’m up to at all times
- WP-DB-Backup makes it easy to back up the content on my site
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin suggests additional posts that relate to the one you’re reading
Since January, I’ve stopped using Automatic Timezone because putting WordPress 2.8 and PHP 5 together makes the daylight savings time magic work.
Third, I was able to find several WordPress themes that I liked and get them installed fairly easily. And switching between them is simple.
Overall, I’m still very happy.
2009-12-05: I spent some time optimizing WordPress which you can read about here.
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Have you ever thought about using Drupal?
No. But now that you ask, I feel like I should look into it. :)
If you haven’t tried them yet, you might check out…
WP Super Cache http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/
WP-SpamFree http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-spamfree/
Google XML Sitemaps http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
I tried the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, but liked Simple Google Sitemap a little better. The Aksimet plugin seems to be doing a good job on spam for me, though I haven’t tried WP-SpamFree. It looks pretty nice though, especially where it claims to make fewer database queries.
And I’ve been reading up on WP Super Cache and Hyper Cache. :-) I’ll probably try both at some point. Currently, I’m using a DB query caching one to see if that helps before I go in whole hog.