WordPress Impressions

I’ve been delving into WordPress with every spare moment I have, and while I know of it’s faults I am also impressed by it’s capabilities. I currently plan to use WP for the student organization’s I am working with, partially because it would give the site’s longevity and prevent them from becoming skeleton pages, but also because I wish to observe how a site might develop if users were left mostly to their own devices in creating and managing content. I think WordPress is perfect for this sort of collaborative content creation.

Of course it is not without it’s faults. I haven’t tried anything too fancy yet, but what I was immediately struck with as I explored the WP documentation was the amount of redundant and outdated tags that are strikingly similar to one another aside from one tag being introduced in a later version but performing essentially the same function. There are instances where functionality was added with these new tags, but one wonders if there wasn’t a better way to merely expand the capabilities of the current WP markup instead of having two versions of nearly every function.

Even this is actually very minor though, the documentation is excellent in explaining what newer tags correspond to older ones, and I found a nifty little extension for Dreamweaver that will automate most of the WP markup creation for whatever you need to do. That made it easy enough to feel like I was cheating, but then I remember how many hours I put into trying to gently coax CSS to do what I want it to, and that just makes it an incredible time-saver.