It’s been a long time since I’ve given my blog any decent amount of loving. I’ve often talked about the things that I’ve wanted to do but my dreams often didn’t produce any tangible results. I have created more design concepts for this website than I care to think about and have many gigabytes of hard drive space taken up by concepts in photoshop format. Some concepts even reached the HTML or Wordpress theme stage, but none went live. In terms of development, I’ve looked reworking and extending Wordpress many times and have even looked at developing a Django-powered version. Nothing came from my redevelopment attempts either. That is, not until today.
I first switched to Wordpress more than four years ago and for a long time it suited my needs perfectly, but times have changed and so have I. Everyday my job requires that I create complicated and elegant solutions to content management (for complicated content, we don’t reinvent the wheel), yet my own site has been run on a basic Wordpress install. Every time I’ve wanted to add functionality, I’ve done what most people do and installed plugins. But, plugins are still limited in what they can do and (please, nobody take offense) Wordpress plugins aren’t always developed to a very high standard. I decided to finally abandon Wordpress.
There were no promises or plans for grandeur. I just started a new symfony project and got down to work. I’ve tried to reproduce as much of the old site’s functionality that I could and I think that I’ve done quite well. Symfony is such a pleasure to work with and I would never have been able to do this without it. It really is a great rapid-development framework. In order to focus my attention properly, I decided not to redesign at the time of redevelopment. I did make various stylistic improvements but the design largely remains the same.
There’s still a lot of work left to do in this initial phase, but I’m happy to now have a platform on which I can begin to evolve this site. Changes will be gradual and incremental but over time there will be plenty of them, that’s not a promise, it’s a fact.