Switching to WordPress: Part 1

Word­press Logo

For many years I’ve looked at the Wor­press plat­form. I’ve played with it some and even went to a Word­camp! For many years my site has been run­ning on the Dot­Net­Nuke plat­form. I first started using it with ver­sion 2 and main­tained my site up through ver­sion 5. It’s main appeal was it was writ­ten in .NET, It had a fairly large com­mu­nity and it was very fea­ture rich. Over the last few years it has become less and less reli­able (some may argue this but with my expe­ri­ence run­ning 10+ sites I found it to be true), the plu­g­ins have become more expen­sive and recently the project was forked into a Pro and Com­mu­nity edi­tion. This began my search for a new blog plat­form. Being a C# devel­oper I nat­u­rally began search­ing for a .NET based solu­tion. I looked at a sev­eral and seri­ously con­sid­ered a couple.

BlogEngine.net
This project looks like it may one day be a viable option but right now I just don’t see it meet­ing my needs.

Telerik Sitefin­ity
This project is very promis­ing. The main draw­back as a per­sonal blog tool is cost and lack of a strong developer/ sup­port community.

After elim­i­nat­ing all the .NET based solu­tions I turned to Word­Press. I was at first appre­hen­sive about it. I don’t know PHP, My server has always been a IIS/.NET/SQL Server based host­ing solu­tion.  So recently I began the process of build­ing my first Apache/MySQL/PHP based server to host my new blog. Over the next few weeks I will be adding to this series what I’ve learned from my experience.