I’m getting really drawn into WordPress and all its wonderful functionality, especially with the release of 3.0.  I retooled the back end of this site to run on WordPress MU a few months ago, because I run a few separate blogs and am in the process of expanding that for family members.

I was happy to see that WordPress merged the base and MU codebases into one, fully-functional software package.  The upgrade wasn’t as smooth as I’d have liked it, but I guess they figure that if you’ve managed to install and maintain MU, you shouldn’t have a problem editing PHP and .htaccess files on your own (as opposed to automating what boils down to three lines of code).   Stupid me misread one of the steps and wound up with no images displaying sitewide for 24 hours, and wondering if I was going to have to re-import all of them.  Once I figured out my mistake, though, the problem seemed pretty trivial.  Other than that, installing and upgrading are remarkably simple.

WordPress has been getting better and better for the end user and administrator since I began using it about two years ago, and now that I’ve begun really getting into the heart of it, I’m really glad that the development has gone toward all of those things that I wish it did.  It’s like they’re reading my mind!

So, on the horizon are three projects that I’d love to tackle.  One is a freelance job that I’m hoping pans out, because it’s a site that I’d love to do.  The second is here at Wharton, which again, I’d love to do.  The third is a complete revamp of PennridgeAlumni.com, a site that I’ve been studiously avoiding for far, far too long.  Redoing it entirely in WordPress now seems like a possibility, and I’m already working on a development version of that.  Let’s see how far I get…

I’m working feverishly to get PennridgeAlumni.Com relaunched before I have to renew hosting, which isn’t going to be with the same company. Of course, that means recoding from Classic ASP into PHP, so no sense in simply translating, I’m working on redesigning the entire thing.

Getting a lot done with AJAX. I’m shifting the user paradigm from a central account area to allowing users to edit things they have access to edit right on the page for instant gratification.

I’m also working on turning PhillyGoth into a WordPress site.

-pb