Switching to WordPress (and other changes)
When I decided to write again I chose TextPattern to publish teamryan. The only other CMS I considered was WordPress. After comparing the two I felt confident in my decision. I was wrong.
I still love TextPattern, and I’m sad to leave. I spent many hours learning TextPattern’s tag system and was happy with the results. My website looked as I had envisioned, and it felt good to support an underdog in the crowded CMS market.
The problem, and I knew this was a possibility when I made my choice, comes from 3rd party applications and plugins that either don’t work with TextPattern or simply don’t exist.
Even when a developer takes the time to work with TextPattern users, as Daniel Jalkut did with MarsEdit, the result is often mixed. I tried for a week to get Delicious daily blog postings to work with Textpattern and finally gave up. I have no idea if a twitter plugin exist for TextPattern, but with WordPress I never had a doubt. Maybe I’d get all three to eventually work with TextPattern, but that’s time I could be writing, or sleeping.
Long term, WordPress is also a safer choice. TextPattern has a dedicated community, but its future is certainly more dubious than WordPress. I’m currently reposting 50 past entires into WordPress by hand. I don’t want to be doing that with hundreds a couple of years from now.
Switching to TeamRyan
I’m using the switch to WordPress to also move my site from teamryan.com/gary to teamryan.com. Telling someone my website lived at teamryan.com slash gary was often a pain resulting in blank stares.
Teamryan.com was originally designed to be a portal not only to my site but other family members. I seemed to have ignored that, at this point, no one else in my family actively publishes a website. The result was an unneeded splash page. I can always reconsider if things change, but for now, this is simpler.
