Why Pixelyzed​.com Is Now Running on WordPress

Last night, I started the process of migrat­ing pix​e​lyzed​.com from a hybrid sta­tic and blog site which ran under blogCFC to a full blog­ging site entirely pow­ered by WordPress (and PHP). As a long time ColdFusion devel­oper and advo­cate, this is a huge change for me. It is a deci­sion I did not take lightly but it was long time com­ing and was moti­vated by sev­eral reasons.

One of those was that I’d grown increas­ingly tired of the design I had in place but I wanted to get some­thing else run­ning quickly while I worked on a new one. Another was that, pix​e​lyzed​.com had started as a small sta­tic site I intended to update occa­sion­ally with longer arti­cles but it had evolved into a hodge-​podge of a sta­tic and blog site. That didn’t work very well as I tacked on the blog later then stopped updat­ing the sta­tic part of the site.

This sit­u­a­tion had another major draw­back for me. Adding the blog meant that any design change needed to be made in two places, the sta­tic part which was all my code, and the blog which was pow­ered by blogCFC (a free ColdFusion based blog­ging plat­form). Time is a lim­ited resource even as a free­lancer… or, espe­cially as a free­lancer so that was not work­ing very well.

Now, beyond those issues, the sec­tion con­tain­ing my pic­tures gallery was built with a Flash solu­tion. Nothing wrong with the soft­ware but it was not triv­ial to pub­lish new images so I barely ever did it after I put in the orig­i­nal ones. Also, the blog­ging soft­ware I was using was not keep­ing up with cur­rent trends and the long awaited new major release was nowhere in sight and noth­ing indi­cated it would be all that much bet­ter than the cur­rent one. Again though, noth­ing really wrong with the soft­ware, espe­cially since it was being devel­oped by a sin­gle indi­vid­ual and there’s only so much a sin­gle per­son can do (on top of pay­ing work). I was real­iz­ing that my needs had out­grown it and I was blog­ging less and less because of it as well as my out­dated design.

The entire site was start­ing to feel very Web 1.0 and it was becom­ing an embar­rass­ment to me. So I decided to make a big change…

Why WordPress?

Like I just said, choos­ing WordPress was a big deci­sion for me because, it is built in PHP and I’ve been work­ing with ColdFusion for years. I feel way out of my com­fort zone here but it is kind of excit­ing. On the other hand, I was plan­ning to learn PHP any­way as it has cropped up in my client work and there’s no deny­ing its momen­tum (no mat­ter what I think of its intrin­sic mer­its com­pared to ColdFusion).

When I real­ized I was blog­ging less because of the short­com­ings of my own site, it also became very clear to me that, the actual soft­ware I was using to blog and the plat­form it was devel­oped with mat­tered far less to me than the tools and fea­tures my cho­sen pub­lish­ing solu­tion could offer. Again, in the blog­ging world, WordPress has a lot of momen­tum now and it doesn’t seem to be slow­ing down… quite the oppo­site (see here and here)

So, as much as I love ColdFusion as a Web devel­op­ment plat­form, there really is no blog­ging soft­ware devel­oped with it that matches WordPress or even comes close. I have dis­cov­ered and tin­kered with another ColdFusion based blog­ging plat­form called Mango Blog which shows a lot of promise though. I just may use on my web​fo​cus​de​sign​.com site because it will prob­a­bly be eas­ier for me to skin it to fit the exist­ing site design as I’m more famil­iar with ColdFusion, and Mango is a sim­pler code base than WordPress.

But why did I finally set­tle on WordPress for pix​e​lyzed​.com? It really came down to the sheer power and flex­i­bil­ity of the plat­form. The admin area is phe­nom­e­nal. Everything has been thought out care­fully to make admin­is­ter­ing a blog easy while giv­ing you a lot of flex­i­bil­ity and power. The sheer size of the WordPress com­mu­nity also means that there are plug-​ins to do pretty much any­thing you want with­out your need­ing to see a line of code, and most of them are free. That is very refresh­ing to see and experience.

I got this blog run­ning on WordPress in a few hours with­out the need to read more that a few lines of instruc­tions. I (re) installed Google Analytics, installed other plug-​ins to tag posts and relate them, tin­kered with the place­ment of wid­gets in my lay­out and more, all with­out leav­ing the com­fort of a visual admin area. The hard­est part of this migra­tion was get­ting all the data out of the blogCFC data­base into the WordPress one and, for that, I had the help of a util­ity I found here. I was even able to set SEO friendly links that fol­low the same pat­tern as those in blogCFC and I cre­ated a cou­ple files to redi­rect calls to posts in their old loca­tion to the cor­rect links in WordPress. Just a few lines of ColdFusion code did the trick.

Ok… that was the plat­form, now what about the design?

Why the Mystique Theme?

As you can see, the site now looks very dif­fer­ent than it did before. It is skinned with a free and very pow­er­ful tem­plate I found yes­ter­day as another from the same designer was ported to Mango Blog and came with the default install.

There are 2 rea­sons why I am using a theme instead of my own design on this site for now. First, like I said above, I was really get­ting tired of the old pix​e​lyzed​.com design. It rep­re­sented where I was as a designer sev­eral years ago and did not reflect who I am today. Secondly, the rea­son I chose the Mystique theme by Digital Nature is that it’s prob­a­bly the polar oppo­site of the old pix​e​lyzed​.com design. While not exactly min­i­mal­ist, it is sim­pler yet bolder than what I had and uses fewer col­ors where my old design used way too many. It is def­i­nitely more in line with the cur­rent trends. I’ve also tried his Fusion theme (the one that was ported to Mango) which is even more min­i­mal­ist but Mystique has a lot more fea­tures so I chose to start off this site’s new era with it.

I am work­ing on a new design for the site and, going with a pre-​made theme was prob­a­bly an even harder deci­sion for me to make than leav­ing the com­fort of the ColdFusion world. But it will take me time to learn the intri­ca­cies of WordPress and be able to skin it at the level of func­tion­al­ity and sophis­ti­ca­tion this and many other exist­ing themes offer. Again, time is lim­ited and I did not want to live with my old design any longer. But a new design of mine will come.

At this time, Mystique is a very refresh­ing change for me and will enable me to focus on the actual con­tent of the site and start blog­ging more reg­u­larly again. I may switch themes from time to time as I dis­cover what’s out there so I’m in no rush to fin­ish my new design. Before now, I might have been embar­rassed as a designer myself to use some­one else’s design on my own site but, right now, it just doesn’t mat­ter to me. My pro­fes­sional site is my port­fo­lio, its design is all mine and it con­tains all the details of my work, exper­tise and ser­vices. If peo­ple want to see what kind of designer I am, they can go there (will add a pod/​widget to the blog’s side­bar with my per­sonal links soon).

What Next?

I don’t know and that is what’s excit­ing. I have a lot of new things to learn and I love doing that, always have. I cer­tainly plan to start blog­ging more again. There’s excit­ing new soft­ware releases on the hori­zon and no, I don’t just mean WordPress 3.0 See you soon and thanks for stick­ing with me!