A few months ago, I decided that I was going to develop a weblog system and offer it as a free download like Movable Type. Unlike MT, the system I was going to create would be simpler, completely dynamic, and powered by PHP and MySQL. I’m not a big fan of Perl and I don’t like some of the problems that come about with MT’s comment spam and static page rebuilding.
I looked around (not very thoroughly) and didn’t find any PHP/MySQL blogging systems so I started some early planning for my system. Well, I picked out a name—that I later second-guessed because it was pretty boring: Speed Weblog. I wanted my system to:
- Be entirely web-based
- Allow easy posting and editing of entries
- Allow categories and sub-categories for entries
- Automatically date entries, but allow for posts to be dated in the past or the future and not appear until that future date/time came about
- Allow “worthwhile clicks” to be added to a sidebar
- Allow commenting
- Generate RSS feeds dynamically for the recent entries
Well, this week I discovered WordPress. It does just about everything I wanted my system to do but it also does more and does it better. I’ve been running a test version to see what it’s capable of accomplishing and it really is quite impressive. I may still develop a CMS in the summer when I have more time to kill, but I will definitely be switching this site to WordPress sometime soon (within two months). It’s going to be a little sad to say goodbye to the system that is running this site right now—which I wrote from scratch—but this system is a crude mockery of a true CMS; it was my first dynamic site, after all.