Use the Right Tool for the Job
by Joseph Jaramillo
I had a rather rough week, and that means I have an urge to write. I sat down to design this blog yesterday afternoon, and have worked pretty much nonstop to get it to where it is at this very moment. Things are shaping up nicely.
Settling on a blog engine proved somewhat difficult. The Rubyist in me wanted to stick with a tool built in that language. If it happened to be a Rails or Merb app, all the better. The first part of the effort was spent installing Typo and Mephisto, and skinning both of them. Having converted to Haml for my Ruby templating needs, Mephisto’s use of Liquid was off-putting. That isn’t a knock against Liquid so much as it means props for Hampton Catlin’s awesome work. The Mephisto admin was clean and efficient, but compared to WordPress it was clear which was more advanced. Typo didn’t prove much better.
My needs for this blog were fairly simple, and WordPress has been doing just this sort of thing longer than just about anybody. The tool is fast, elegant, easy to use, and well-maintained. The only real knock I have for WordPress is having to deal with straight-up PHP templates for skinning. This is probably exacerbated by the exceptionally poor indentation used in the default templates. Haml markup is indentation-based, so outputted HTML is perfectly indented. This makes debugging rendering issues easier.
That being said, this is a blog, and now that it’s skinned I won’t need to deal with many templates. That makes it easy to settle back into the interface itself, which is outstanding. WordPress just smacks of people sweating the details, and that’s great to see regardless of language.
There are times when the right tool for the job is in a language or on a platform that you don’t like. That’s WordPress for me. PHP isn’t my forté and it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, but this tool is so good it absolutely puts to rest any argument that any one thing is fundamentally superior to another. I’m a Ruby developer through and through, but as much as I love the tools and the language there simply isn’t a single Ruby blog application with this level of polish. My needs for a blog weren’t terribly specific, and I didn’t need to plug into any backend systems. The only thing that would have held me back is my own bias, and that would be silly.
If something better than WordPress happens to come along, and it happens to be written in Ruby, I’ll take a look. Until that time, WordPress looks like it’s the right tool for the job. That should’ve been a no-brainer.
WordPress is indeed in a league of its own when it comes to the simple straight forward goal of “write stuff and get it online, effortlessly”.
I’ve just chosen it (well WordPress Ι) to use for our CMS for multiple sites. I’d really like a merb solution. However there just aren’t any… I was using Joomla, setting up a brand new Joomla install for each site is a pain. Joomla is complicated. A simple task, involved 3-4 steps instead of one…
I’m hoping Harmony by ordered list can replace my hack solution. I don’t want to invent another wheel, I’d take too long.
Anyways – like your theme
Permalink: March 3rd, 2009 at 12:22 am
Thanks! Your comment just made me realize I hadn’t styled those. Another item for the to-do list!
Permalink: March 3rd, 2009 at 12:26 am
To the guy who said there aren’t any merb solutions, I’m currently investigating feather. And, it installs as a slice if you want to.
That is, if you want to- mountable apps in merb are just around the corner, which are only a prelude to Rails 3. I’ve been debating whether or not I want to wait until then..
Permalink: March 3rd, 2009 at 12:47 am
I understood very little of that post, but I absolutely concur with Wordpress (in comparison to other blogging engines). The third party app support alone makes it the clear leader.
I’m loving the new site!
Permalink: March 3rd, 2009 at 9:10 am
There’s something wrong… you said you didn’t want to go with a Ruby solution because of the templating language, but you chose the worst possible one in that regards.
Mephisto and Typo would “get content online” as easily and the templating language (liquid or erb) is much better than Wordpress’ awful one. It uses weird and deprecated PHP syntax for its users.
Anyways, the only important thing is that you’re actually writing now.
Permalink: March 3rd, 2009 at 1:51 pm
@Jerome:
I think you misunderstood my post. I said I wanted to go with a Ruby solution, but that I didn’t care for any of them. The templating systems in Typo and Mephisto were but one complaint. My point was that skinning the blog in WordPress was a minor issue compared to the other more glaring problems with the Ruby-based systems.
Permalink: March 3rd, 2009 at 2:14 pm
@Liam There aren’t any that do it all with zero effort. I don’t want to write my own extensions for every single site. Then have to go through all those separate installs to update them.
Hence my comment. There are none that allow the management of “multiple sites” from one login.
Some time has passed and I’ve found scanty which has a CouchDB fork of which I filled with and updated. So I’ve got my pad and pencil, figured some stuff out and it should be pretty simply to roll my own…
Permalink: March 8th, 2009 at 4:31 am
Useful examination of the different platforms. I share your Ruby bias and ended up moving to Wordpress for the same reasons. Wish I had found your article earlier. Cheers.
Permalink: February 10th, 2010 at 3:31 pm