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.

I decided to switch my blog back to WordPress for a number of reasons.

First, I was tired of messing with Drupal. If you want to dig-in, really understand Drupal and all its complexity, and also ensure you maintain your setup, it’s fine. But for my purposes, it was just too bulky and complex. It can be made to do a LOT of stuff, but for a personal blog, it’s mucho overkill. I had my fun.

Second, our Family Blog is in some need of repair, and because it’s on an older version of WordPress, I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone.

Third, v2.7.1 of WordPress (what I installed) is pretty nifty. It’s VERY easy to run compared with Drupal, and it’s gotten much better since I installed it a few years ago. The RTE looks very good (especially compared with Drupal’s), and its image and gallery options also look attractive, and usable for my wife.

Anyway, installing the base system was easy and quick – I think it took all of 5 minutes once it was uploaded to my site. The trick was converting from Drupal. Drupal 6′s plugin (module) system is, suffice it to say, not as easy to use as WordPress’s is. Powerful, but complex and technical. Anyway, there don’t appear to be any straight-forward “Export to CSV” options out there, and my choices were to either do it by hand or spend a few hours wrestling with some modules. I decided to go with the former approach, and just tossed a MySQL export of my nodes (Drupal’s content) at Excel. I had to convert the unix-timestamps to strings, and weed out some extraneous information, but it was pretty easy. Excel didn’t want to cooperate with Pipe (|) delimiters, so I had to futz with that too.

The whole process CSV preparation process took me about 2 hours from start to finish.

I then had to import the CSV. WordPress v2.7.1 does not come with a built-in CSV import routine, but I found a plugin that installed nicely. After a couple of false starts (my fault), I had data!

I had to mess around with permalinks to get them to work the way I wanted them to. Next up was the NextGEN Image Gallery plugin, which looks like exactly what my wife and I have been searching for with an integrated gallery system. There are countless options for integrating with Gallery2, Picasa, or Flickr, but we like to control our own images on our site. As it turns out, I probably should have installed NextGEN BEFORE I configured permalinks, since it didn’t work right off, and I had to go through a couple of iterations before I figured out what was going on.

There were some pretty funky themes out there, but iNove looked the cleanest and easiest to modify for my purposes. Not perfect, but definitely workable. I grabbed Facebook and Yelp badges, but may get rid of them. I also added an “anti-IE” header plugin – if you’re reading this on IE6, shame on you!

So, thus far, I’m pretty happy with the setup. My only annoyance, at this point, is the system’s insistence that I add a Category to my posts… otherwise it puts it into the “Uncategorized” category, and manages and presents the content that way. Bleh – maybe I’ll just create a category called “Posts” and be done with it.

I still have a decent amount of image re-insertion to worry about, but that’ll be handled in the next week or so.