December 25, 2005

Pressing Matters

WordPress 2.0 is right around the corner. They released RC3 (Release Candidate 3) a few days ago and I downloaded it but have been too busy (or too lazy :p) to do much with it. I read up on what was new in WP 2.0 a few days ago after I downloaded the RC and none of it was actually appealing from an end-user point of view :p Most of the major changes are under the hood or in the admin panel. The under the hood changes promise new plugins and new functionality further down the road and the admin panel changes gives you pretty coloured feedback on when you delete a line or activate a theme. From an end-user perspective, big deal!

Of course, I’m not belittling all of the hardwork put in by the WordPress developers. But then again, given that when I came into WordPress a couple of years ago and they were working on WP 1.3 (I think?) there was all this talk about multiple blogs from the same WordPress installation. Every new release would be accompanied by the (perhaps implied) promise that multiple blogs were right around the corner and would be there soon. Now WordPress 2.0 has come around and it appears that the developers have dropped multiple blogs altogether since there are other projects around working on this. I feel cheated :p

When I switched from Movable Type to WordPress, I wanted a blogging system that would handle multiple blogs. There were other reasons for the move but at that point, one of the deciding factors in me picking WordPress was the fact that multiple blogs were supposed to be "just around the corner". Of course, it’s beside the fact that I don’t really need the multiple blogs functionality anymore – I still feel cheated :p Yes, I’ll stop whining about the multiple blog support now … though I might try to get at least one more whine in before this entry is complete 🙂

Overall, I’m happy with WP as it is. It does the job and some of the plugins actually make it totally worthwhile. For instance, Bad Behaviour and Spam Karma have almost eliminated all spam comments from my blog – now that’s a great thing. However, I don’t get a feel for where WordPress overall as a blogging tool is heading at the moment and that makes me wonder if I should start looking at alternatives again … and yes, I’d want an alternative which also has multiple blog functionality :p

Tags: ,
Posted by Fahim at 7:39 am  |  1 Comment