Learning WordPress

Part of the delay with launching this site was the platform it’s built on: I’ve been wanting to learn WordPress, both as a blogging tool and for general site content management, and this was a good excuse to do it. I’ve been hand-coding my personal sites since I learned HTML (I’ve never been satisfied with the code WYSIWYG editors generate) so this was quite a change for me. And since I didn’t want to use a generic WordPress theme, there was a big learning curve figuring out how to customize the templates to do what I want.

Rather than start from scratch, I did some research and decided to use the Thematic Theme Framework, a simple but easy-to-customize WordPress template. I still had to do a bunch of custom PHP work and there’s too much unnecessary code under the hood, but overall I’m happy with the result. Thematic let me get up and running relatively quickly, and so far I’ve been satisfied with WordPress.

The other bit of learning was with the NextGEN Gallery plug-in. It’s a very powerful and easily customized photo gallery plug-in for WordPress, and I’m using it to display the portfolio images on the site. Finally, I used Header Image Rotator Pro for the main image on the home page.

Eventually I’ll get the templates and code cleaned up the way I like it, but for now I’m happy to have a site that easy to update.