For a long time this site has been running on a custom written script. It has worked well, but one month ago we decided to migrate to wordpress. Here is our experience and tips for others thinking of making the change.Behind this site there is a professional web cunsulting company from Sweden. We have lots of experience in creating everything from CMS, ad systems, communities and other custom written systems. But, one month ago we decided to dump the system behind this site and replace it with wordpress. We had two choices. The first was to put a lot of hours and money into creating a new system for 999tutorials.com that had all functions and stuff we wanted, or migrate to wordpress that already has  this. After some thinking the choice was not that hard. 999tutorials is not a huge site yet, so minimize the amount of hours to get the new version up and running we went with the competent system Wordpress.

Good things with Wordpress

Millions of sites can’t be wrong?

Seriously, wordpress is a fully competent CMS / Blog system. It has a huge user base and a dedicated developer group. This makes the system work perfectly and is tested for bugs and glitches like nothing else.

One of the first things that you will notice with Wordpress is the ease of creating content. I know how much time they have spent together with a usability company and as a web company we really notice that all things are well thought through. Probably a normal user will not notice, but everything “just works like it should” and that is probably one of the hardest things to achive. People know when a site is bad but they don’t react when it’s good… it’s just good and that is what describes Wordpress.

Wordpress have customized Tinymce from the Swedish company Moxicode. We use Tinymce in lots of our clients sites, and the only thing we have against tinymce is that it has to much good things that can make it hard to work with. It’s not tinymce’s fault, but to make it work really good you need to customize it and this is what wordpress has managed to  to really really good. For example they have created a great way to work with images and media files, that can be hard with tinymce even through their filemanager and imagemanager that is pretty good.

The interface in Wordpress when creating a new post is great. It’s easy to change between Visual editing and raw HTML editing. With the right column makes it easy to change status of the post, assign/create tags and assign the appropiate category. Many systems makes it hard to do such easy things, you need to go to a new page and create a tag or category and then back to creating your post and check your category. It sounds like a small thing, but this is something that makes it easy to work with your site and create content. After all that is that is what it is all about right?!

Plugins

Another great thing with a widely used system is that people create plugins that enhance the system even more. For what ever you need you will probably find a working plugin for it.

So far we have only installed a few plugins, but we know there are a lot of other plugins we will install soon.

If you are changing from another script either if it’s your own script or it’s another CMS your urls for your old pages and posts will probably not be the same as in wordpress. The first thing we did was to change the way urls look like in wordpress. Click “Settings” -> “Permalinks” and choose “Permalinks” and enter this string /%category%/%postname%/

What this little string makes is change the urls to be formed with the category name and postname for each post. Let’s say your post is assigned to the category PHP and your post is called “Hello world” the url wille be /php/hello-world/.

Our problem was that our urls was something like this: /tutorial-hello-world.html. We were thinking of creating a large .htaccess file to redirect old posts to the new address but found a Redirection plugin. After installing the plugin we got a new link under “tools” where we can add all our old urls and what address they should be redirected to. An extra thing this plugin does is to keep track if you change the title of your posts. Because if you change the name of your posts the address can change because they are made up of the title, but this polugin automaticly creates a redirect to solve that. A not (also to the developers) is that if you change category from A to B and then back to A you will get stuck in a redirect loop. But you can always to into the plugin and find this and remove it. You can also see how many times your redirects has been used.

The first plugin you should install is the anti spam plugin from akismet. It is actually already built in when you download wordpress but you need activate it. One thing needs to be done when installing it and that is to get a key that authorizes you to use their service all for free. Follow the directions, it’s quick and easy and you only need to enter the key in your wordpress admin to get up and running . Akismet then works like your slave and checks and deletes almost all spams that might try to get into your comments. Belive me, you will get lots of spam from automatic robots and Akismet is your God that helps you out :-)

Final words

There will be lots of more tutorials and articles about Wordpress, but this is all for now. Our first words and experiences from changing to Wordpress. So far we love our new friend :-) Thanks Wordpress

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