I upgraded to 2.9.2 today – it took me all of 1 click and about 45 seconds of waiting, for a major upgrade. No problems, no glitches, nothing.

I love Wordpress as a CMS. That is all.

For whatever it’s worth, my upgrade to 2.8 didn’t go completely without issue: even though I reported success, my Gallery plugin had some issues with new the version. A quick “automatic upgrade” fixed my issues with it though. So, feeling empowered by these recent successes, I decided to upgrade to the latest version of my underlying (iNove) theme too. It wasn’t quite as easy as the Wordpress update was, but still pretty painless. I had to comment out some PHP, make a handful of CSS changes, and upload a few new images, but overall, things are the way I like them.

The new drag and drop Widgets interface is pretty neat. I don’t like how Wordpress (or is it my theme??) handles ‘empty’ sections, though: it assumes that if it’s empty, you really want the default widgets there, like Blogroll. In fact, if it’s empty, that means I want it to be empty! I was able to work around this by rearranging my widgets, but it was a tad bit annoying to start.

In other news, we should be finishing up our pool wiring/lighting project today! I’ll have to make another quick trip to Home Depot, but all the hard stuff is done (base wiring, switches, etc.) and all that’s left is drilling a few holes and pulling cables through conduit. The lights themselves are coming out really nice too – I frosted the glass panes with some Valspar Frosting enamel and mounted them directly to my 5×5 PVC post caps.

A new minor release of Wordpress was released about a week ago, and I have been tracking the user response of it so far. Given that everything looks smooth, I went ahead and upgraded. If you’re experienced with upgrading other web-based systems, you know that this process can be painful (in some cases, VERY painful), but with Wordpress, it’s as simple as clicking a button – literally. It’s still recommended that you take a backup of your system, but the ease with which a major upgrade can be applied to the system is still a joy to behold. Wordpress makes things drop-dead easy, and, as always, it just works.

Re: the pool – we’re almost done! The rain has been keeping the crew from handling a concrete grading issue, and we’re still without a slide for now, but overall, things are looking great! The deck is very nice and our new automatic chlorinator (we switched to a Salt Water system) is chugging away – I can’t wait until I have the opportunity to jump in and give it a shot. Supposedly, salt water pools have a very nice, silky feel to them, in addition to being easier on the eyes and skin – and, of course, not having to put chlorine in is great too!

I’ve taken the opportunity to run some wiring in the pool area, too, so we can have better night-time lighting, and more accessible electrical outlets. It’s definitely been a lot more effort than I expected, but both Mary Lou and I are really liking how it’s all coming together. Pictures of the entire project will be posted soon!

I continue to be impressed with Wordpress’s drop-dead-easy and flawless operations. For fun, I decided to give Google’s Site Analytics system a try, and, as I’ve come to expect, it was easy and just worked, with no manual coding required. Analytics does require the addition of some javascript to each page, of course, and I could have edited the theme’s header.php file to handle this, but a quick search in the Admin console brought up several plugin options, and I was able to install and configure one within minutes.

Google Analytics is a very powerful system – I was impressed with the number of reports and the granularity of them. It doesn’t do real-time reporting, so I had to wait 24 hours for my first set of results, but what do you want for nothing?

I’m also messing around with Google Apps for small business (or personal domains). Right now, mail to addressATchrispaquin.com just gets sucked into my regular gmail account (and then accessed via Thunderbird), but it’ll be fun to play with this tool.

I completely finished my site conversion (from Drupal to Wordpress), and am pretty happy with how it all went, and how relatively easy it was. With some very minor exceptions (mostly gallery-related), everything is running smoothly. I’m also pleased with how user-friendly Wordpress is to the system admin: Plugins can be installed, configured, and even edited on the fly. No need to fire up an FTP client. In addition, everything just works. I can’t tell you how many tweaks I had to make in Drupal to get stuff (like a workable RTE) to function properly.

Just for fun, I fired my old Drupal site back up for an apples-to-apples performance comparison, and it wasn’t even close. Each site has the appropriate “super-caching” mechanisms enabled, and even with that, Wordpress still beat Drupal in the ’snappiness’ contest by a mile.

I should point out that this is nowhere near a fair comparison: Drupal is a full-blown, highly customizable and complex WCMS, whereas Wordpress is very focused on just being a blog. But I think it’s still worthwhile to point out that if your needs are simple, you can be up-and-running with Wordpress with less pain than other options.

Speaking of which, I took Joomla for a spin too – it installed easily, but I have to admit I was completely confused by its totally foreign (at least to me) metaphor. I know I didn’t give it enough time (and I do plan on continuing to play with it), but it’s definitely not the drop-dead-easy WCMS I was expecting. It’s certainly attractive enough, but it doesn’t look like you can just hop in.

Here’s a pretty good article that goes into the strengths and weaknesses of each platform.