State of WordPress

I haven’t commented much on the conversion from MovableType to WordPress, except that I did it, it was easy and, so far, I’m pretty happy with WordPress.

There are, however, a couple of things that I haven’t quite got together yet. For instance, under MovableType, I had a great plugin called MTRecentImages. MTRecentImages allowed me to display thumbnails of n-number of recent images in a specific category. I’ve not found anything to do that yet on a WordPress blog.

Also, while pages generated by the photo gallery plug in I’m using (called LazyGallery) look okay, the back-end is more than a bit clunky. The images have to be FTP’d to a named directory in a specific place on the web server. If an image or directory has a character that LazyGallery doesn’t like, the image doesn’t display. I’m currently investigating a couple of galleries alternatives, one of which requires me to host images off-site at Flickr. There is a “recent images” plugin that works with the same off-site host, so, I may ultimately go with that option. (more information and examples)

On the plus side, I haven’t gotten a single comment spam since I’ve switched! (I was battling as many as 50 per day!), and, to me, the user interface is much, much cleaner. I even almost understand the template coding.

Sometime either this week or next, I’ll be making the minor upgrade to WP 1.5.1, along with the minor hack to correct an RSS feed bug. The site will be down for the 10-or-so minutes that are required to replace all the backside code. Once the new version is installed, the odd sorting of the site categories should be fixed, along with a few other bugs that I’ve not even noticed.