Phil Central

I have to say that after fully setting up, customizing, adding plugins to, and configuring WordPress, it’s very easy to recommend it. If you are not hosting your own site, and you have PHP and MySQL on your host, there isn’t a better solution out there than WordPress.

WordPress feels like it is designed from the ground up to give bloggers on 3rd party hosts features as if they were hosting themselves. With other blogging solutions I have tried, there were always three hurdles getting them configured. Setting up, customizing templates, and email posting.

The first was always creating the databases and setting up the software. Basically, with WordPress, you create a database, configure a text and WordPress does the rest fully filling in workable default settings without asking you for input. Literally takes less than 5 minutes as advertised. I think this is ideal for both novice and advanced users. Novices will enjoy being able to jump into a fully featured blog with no fuss. For advanced users, like myself, it’s easier for some to customize something if they already see the default value. The management system is intuitive enough that you can click through every option in the first 10 minutes. So that’s the setup, it was painless.

Next up is the template and customization of appearances of the blog. I’m not gonna lie, WordPress doesn’t excel any more than any other blog software in this department. It took just as much time to perfect my template than it did with MovableType or Blogger. I will give it this, the system is intuitive and well documented. Anytime I wanted to do something, the WordPress Codex helped me quickly find a solution. I was able to get my site to behave exactly as I intended after I figured out WordPress’s odd template structure. In the end, I grew to appreciate it and I feel it is the ideal way to template any dynamically generated blog.

Finally comes my favorite feature. Email posting! I love to post by email. I’m actually gonna break this down into two separate reviews: email posting before plugins, and email posting after plugins.

The core of WordPress’s email posting goodness comes from the fact that it requires absolutely no special configuration on your web server. With other solutions, I have had to install special scripts, create cron jobs to call them, configure procmail, and other such nonsense. WordPress’s core configuration allows you to configure it to go out, check a pop3 inbox (you can create these for free with almost any ISP, I use cox, or several other free services), and post the mail it finds in that inbox to your blog… absolutely genius. There are some limitations, it does not let you use SSL pop3 servers (gmail), it does not let you assign categories on a per email basis, doesn’t have image support (as far as I can tell) and it does not strip line breaks at all which creates some funky looking posts. Here is a quick hack I added to wp-mail.php to strip line breaks: wp-mail.php. Back up your current wp-mail.php and try this one, see if it helps. This is from WordPress 2.1.3.. One more note before I move on, because most people can’t set up cron on their server to have WordPress periodically check for new mail posts, there is a plugin wp-cron that basically runs anytime your site is accessed and performs specific tasks every 15, 30, 45 minutes or every hour. Pretty neat.

Anyway, moving on… here’s where WordPress really shines, plugins… and here is one of the best: postie! This improves the WordPress email posting ten fold. It lets you customize everything directly from the email you send. It strips line breaks. It lets you check SSL pop3 accounts (gmail, etc). It processes attachments and posts images inline, it’s pretty fantastic. It also has a plugin for the above mentioned wp-cron plugin to allow it perform it’s tasks every 15 minutes. So, if your using WordPress and email posting, you should be using Postie!

The plugins for WordPress are top notch, really worth checking into, and the documentation for every feature of it is accessible and easy to read and process with several examples for every function. Overall, I highly recommend it over many other blogging solutions, especially if you don’t have low level access to your server. It has many features not documented in this article, and is suitable for many uses besides straight blogging. Do yourself a favor and check it out.