Blog Recipe

WordPress

April 2014

Primarily to make authoring and presentation easier, I migrated my blog and various websites I had been maintaining from Drupal to WordPress.

I decided to host my own WordPress implementation on a virtual server as I wanted that flexibility and I’ve been using that model for Drupal. I decided that at least for now, I do not want to maintain multiple independent WordPress sites or use WordPress multisite. One of the most important steps I took was to establish a dedicated git repository (hosted on GitHub) for all the site code, which will go a long way to maintaining my sanity and code backups, as well as making it easier to get versions of the site running locally or on different servers.

At this point, I’m not doing anything real fancy with WordPress, as I’m mostly focused on making sure everything made it to WordPress in the migration from Drupal. I was able to partly automate migration, but in the end, there was quite a bit of manual work as I had highly customized my Drupal site and the complexity of fully automating migration would have taken me more time then doing some migration manually.

Highlights were to migrate all blog posts to WordPress posts and to consolidate some independent Drupal sites I’d been maintaining into the xolotl.org WordPress site as hierarchies of pages (see MakerCart, Mediapede and Teaching History through Film). I haven’t completely decided what to do about the repository of pictures I had in Drupal. I started posting them here in WordPress, but am still trying to make some decisions about how I want picture posts to be a part of my blog and their relationship to my Flickr photostream. I did decide to archive the custom resume/CV I had built in Drupal and just direct people toward my LinkedIn profile. There’s the balance I’m still sorting out about hosting things like pictures and professional history in platforms dedicated to such things like Flickr and LinkedIn, versus hosting them yourself on a platform you own and control.

Changelog

Following is an abbreviated changelog that doesn’t reflect everything I try out, but lists change made that I expect to actually use on an ongoing basis.

03 MAY 2014

  • installed plugin Disqus Comment System 2.74 and migrated all existing comments to Disqus
  • updated theme Epik 1.4

27 APR 2014

  • installed plugin Genesis Simple Sidebars 2.0.1: This enables me to deliver sidebars with different widgets for different areas of the site.
  • installed plugin jQuery Vertical Accordion Menu 3.1.2: More sophisticated menus in sidebars.
  • installed plugin Simple Social Icons 1.0.6: Nice looking social media network icons, which I’m displaying in a header widget.

24 APR 2014

  • updated to WordPress 3.9

06 APR 2014

  • installed plugin Ninja Forms 2.6: Simple forms for contact, etc.

05 APR 2014

  • installed WordPress 3.81
  • installed theme engine Genesis 2.0.2
  • installed theme Epik 1.3
  • installed plugin Genesis Simple Edits 1.7.1

04 APR 2014

  • established github repository (sorry, it’s private)
  • established self-hosted WordPress implementation
    • PHP 5.3.10-1ubuntu3.11
    • mySQL 5.5.37-0ubuntu0.12.04.1
    • Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS
    • Rackspace virtual server hosting

Drupal

April 2007-April 2014

For seven years, my blog ran on the open-source Drupal platform, using Drupal versions 5-7. Nothing accelerated by technical skills and experience more than working with Drupal—insert snark about Drupal’s technical complexity (which is less and less true) here. I’ve been proud to be a member of the Drupal community, one of my most favorite—in open-source technology and beyond—and I hope and expect to continue to support and intersect with Drupal and Drupalistas. You can read more details about how I blogged with Drupal by reading my last Drupal blog recipe and browsing the #drupal tag on this site.