WordPress Adoption — Confessions of an ASP.NET Developer
Friday, August 29th, 2008A bit about me:
- I am web developer
- I am a .NET developer (ASP.NET, C#, VB)
- I am a Web Standards freak
OK, those last two don’t go very well together, and that has been my cross to bear.
For years, I have been looking for an open source ASP.NET CMS/blogging engine that I could use for myself and for other small websites. The catch was it had to adhere to Web Standards (valid XHTML 1.0 Strict markup, CSS for layout, etc). I found a few that sort of worked and I even wrote a few custom ones myself, but I was never satisfied.
Well, I give up.
For the last few months, I have been working on the website for my son’s (now former — he started kindergarten on Wednesday) preschool. As usual, I had no problem getting the site working using ASP.NET (everything validated, cleanish CSS), BUT I hadn’t tackled how I was going to handle the CMS.
I started down the road of using the MVC pattern in ASP.NET 3.5 with the help of Chris Tavares’ article, Building Web Apps without Web Forms. But then …
While attending Kelly Goto’s presentation at (the best conference I’ve yet attended) An Event Apart in San Francisco, she made an offhand comment about creating a website for her mom. She talked about simply getting WordPress up and running for her mom in about 15 minutes, and letting her mom take over. Preso … a website.
Now, I don’t know much about WordPress or PHP or MySql, but if Kelly’s mom can do it …
I then spent the next few evening doing some pilot projects to see how easy or hard it would be to get WordPress to act more like a CMS, and I’m converted. So far I haven’t found any gotchas that will prevent me from using WordPress for smaller websites. And even giving my handicap of not knowing PHP, it has been easier to write themes for WordPress than it would have been to write my own CMS in ASP.NET.