First of all, can I just say that I feel especially proud of my first WordPress CMS foray? Oh good!

For a while now, a friend and client, Violeta Edge, has been asking me to create a ‘site she can change herself'. Now, I have to admit to a couple of control issue problems so I did take a little coaxing, but at the end of the day, what a client wants, a client gets (within reason and within moral codes! *smile*).

So ... I backed up the lovingly and painstakingly created hand-coded site and embarked on a journey into learning how to install and configure my second Open Source Content Management System (CMS). The other system I've used for a number of client sites (including my own) was Joomla. I dunno what it is about the safe and familiar, but I was a little hesitant to stray from it. Actually, I DO know what it is because picking up any new tool takes time and you feel like a teenager attending their first dance: awkward and superfluous. Some things never change.

High school ruminations aside, I really enjoyed setting up my first WordPress site. Including porting the old content, it only took about five hours (granted I had Wimbledon on in the background). Of course, it then took another five hours or so to tweak it and really get my head around the whole post versus page thing and get my posts posting, as well as finding some useful plugins for contact forms and the like. While I'm sure there are lots of WordPress gurus that take a lot less time, I reckon being able to create a complete website including a CMS in that time, particularly with a completely new system, is pretty awesome.

My next hurdle will be to explore creating my own themes though because the basic ones in the WordPress install are just that: basic. I'd also like to see more WYSIWYG versatility in terms of replacing the header and background content, but I'm sure I'll learn more as I go.

In summary, at this stage, I'd be inclined to recommend using WordPress over Joomla because it seems more intuitive to install and use. If you want to edit ‘normal' pages, go to ... pages. (You don't have to create an article and then add a menu item that links to that article like you do in Joomla.) If you want to post something new in your blog, go to ... posts. From a developer's standpoint, the fact that the blog function is native and bang-on ready to go is also a huge plus.

So, yeah, although I'm a WordPress newbie, colour me impressed. Now, please excuse me while I go read up on themes. I may be a while so don't wait up.