Earlier this year, I was made aware of a partnership between Stack Exchange and RunKeeper to install a Healthy button on the Fitness & Nutrition Stack Exchange site. As a member and moderator of the site, I thought it was an excellent idea to help promote good and healthy content to a fitness audience in addition to other major social media channels. RunKeeper made an official announcement on their blog about a month ago, and the button was officially unveiled on Stack Exchange. I thought that since it was such a neat idea that it would be great to also have it on the Fitness Stack Exchange blog.
Tag Archives: Wordpress
Contending with WordPress
My latest personal project was to migrate and update the site of my kung fu school. My sifu had asked me for input on the website since the original administrator was moving to a different hosting provider. Ideas were thrown around, and I suggested moving the site to a WordPress configuration.
There were two roadpaths with WordPress: have it hosted on WordPress.com, the commercial enterprise owned and started by the same people who created WordPress; or use WordPress.org which has the downloadable free, open-source blogging platform software. After having used WordPress.org for years and years, I decided to explore the WordPress.com option.
There are differences between the “com” and “org” incarnations of WordPress. I have been a user of WordPress for years, running it on my own hosting provider (actually sharing it with someone else). I had also signed up on WordPress.com (for an Akismet account) and thought, at the time, that it was very limited. I do not know what changes have taken place since then but I explored the options available, and liked them better than the base package Google Sites or Windows Live provides.
All I did to migrate my school’s website was create an account, set up some pages, picked a theme, uploaded some files, copied content, created a new banner image, and then mapped the domain. I didn’t have to worry about back-end administration like databases, backups, disk space, themes, and so on. I can do the same thing on my own, but I didn’t want to take on those responsibilities at the time.
WordPress.com already provided everything (or nearly everything) I had done with my own blog and Youth A.C.T.’s website and not to mention that most features are free right from the start. A simple website doesn’t need much more than that. However, as feature-rich as WordPress.com is, they are still rather limited in terms of how much control you can exude over your site.
After some initial discussion with my instructor, we determined what we wanted in the website and the feasibility of implementing ideas. I decided that it would be best to move the school’s site off to its own WordPress-hosted service where we could control the site on a deeper level. This largely meant being able to utilize other themes not available on WordPress.com, install plug-ins that suited our needs, and being able to customize the look and feel.
The new (new) site has up and functional for a few weeks now. A lot of people I solicited for feedback have said it looks very nice and professional (their opinion, not mine) and that information is much easier to find. I can’t take complete credit for what I did; WordPress has great community support and dozens of plug-ins and themes, and the authors deserve lots of thanks for their efforts.
Drupal vs. WordPress
For the recent month and a half, I have been placed in charge of all things webby for this new youth organization in Massachusetts. We’re called Youth A.C.T., a group for empowering youth and getting them involved in their community. We’re still in the process of getting up and running but already have some events and projects going on. From my technical point of view, this has presented me with an interesting problem of how to run this website.
Basically the whole website infrastructure came down to what kind of CMS do I want to run. I had tested out various ones like Joomla! and whatever random ones my hosting provider had. They weren’t too impressive and didn’t fit our needs (read: mine). I had previously worked a little bit with Drupal 4.7 while I was working at the University of Maryland, and that was the first CMS that sprung to my mind. The other was WordPress which I’ve also had experience with (since it’s what I use to run my blog).
Drupal has incredible community support. There are so many themes and modules so readily available. Basically what attracted me to Drupal (for the purposes of the Youth A.C.T. website) was the Event Manager module. This was perfect since we needed something for online user registration for an upcoming event. I got this up and running within minutes, and since then I have just steadily been putting other useful things together in Drupal.
However, there are some things about Drupal that irk me. While the administrative configuration is very comprehensive, it is also quite cumbersome and feels convoluted at times. For some time, I had shrugged it off and learned what I needed to do as I went along. Then there is the case for my other users — the various people (teenagers, young adults, older adults) who would come and also help administrate. Even though I have given them enough privileges to administer what they need to on the site, they are still confused. It is kind of a shock when you grow up in a such a technological age, but there are still lots of people who have no idea how their computer works let alone writing simple HTML code. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Doing a Gallery 2 integration with Drupal was a pain in the ass. Gallery 2 is just very bloated and feels difficult work with to the point where I had considered abandoning it for WordPress. I understand WordPress much more, and it may be better for the clueless user. The administrative navigation is a lot simpler and more straightforward (yay for version 2.5!) in my opinion. I bet my marbles WYSIWYG helps out a lot too. The other reason why I would move to WordPress is because of laziness. I do not have much time outside of work, tai chi, kung fu, and other various activities. I also like to maintain a healthy sleep schedule as well. I understand how WordPress works (to a degree, enough for me to carry on). While the Drupal documentation is extensive, comprehensive, and everything I’ve always wanted when I look for documentation, I just don’t have the time or patience presently to go through it all and learn it.
If I did move to WordPress, I would just have to find replacements for the various modules I used in Drupal. There isn’t any built-in event management in WordPress nor could I find an existing plugin for it, but there is always various tricks I can use to get around its shortcomings. Google Docs is wonderful for creating simple forms and surveys, and our organization (read: I) have already registered a Google Account for e-mail and document sharing (and people are still clueless on how to use Google Docs). While I’ve seen various gallery plugins for WordPress, there isn’t anything stopping me from using Flickr (and even combining it with a plugin that uses its API). In the meantime, I’m still going to press forward with Drupal and try another album/gallery module. If it doesn’t work out, then I most likely will move to WordPress. I could even potentially leverage volunteers to create themes (for either Drupal or WordPress) since I have no artistic eye.
In the time that I spent writing this post, I could have been working on the website. And now I have to go to sleep for work tomorrow.
