Tony Dewan

Wordpress is great. It's relatively easy to set up, easy to extend, and allows for quite a bit of customization. So, why didn't I use it?

This begs a much larger question: Why didn't I use any CMS/Blogging Platform/Publishing Engine?

See here's the thing: among other things, I'm a web developer. I build things on the web all the time; I make websites and web applications for a living. I've used most of the CMS's/Blogging Platforms/Publishing Engines to some extent, and they all have one thing in common: They're clunky. More precisely, they're clunky for me. It's frustrating for me to learn the taxonomies and methodologies of a platform, because I often have my own (however invalid) ideas about how they should be implemented. I also have a deeper knowledge of the underlying technologies, so the abstractions inherently built into a given system confuse me more than they might a normal user. They're necessary to present usable task flows for non technical users, but they force me to adjust my mental model of what's going on to fit someone elses. Even worse, they sometimes create weird and unsemantic markup.

So, I don't use one. Well, I kind of use one. I built my own little platform using a popular lightweight PHP framework designed with the MVC approach. It's nothing special, but it allows me to do exactly what I want to do how I want to do.

But here's the downside: I'll end up spending much more time in the long run tweaking, adding on, and managing. I have less front-loaded frustration traded for a potentially long term time sink. I'm okay with that now. We'll see how I feel in six months. Which is why it's okay if you use an off the shelf CMS. You probably value your time more than I do mine.