In the lead up to launching this blog, I thought long and hard about the system behind it, and what I wanted it to run off. Inspired by this post, I chose to write my own and spent a good few months writing the software. Today however I move back to WordPress, for a number of reasons.

As it turns out, writing your own blogging system is harder then I imagined. Looking over at Simon’s blog, it seems to be very simple. No categories, no truncated posts- just posts and comments. It was vastly different to the system I wanted, and I persisted onwards, ignoring the many limitations that would one day come back and haunt me.

One such factor that I wanted to include, but couldn’t implement was trackbacks (or pingbacks). To put it simply, they manage all of the incoming and outgoing links to your blog to create a network of linked posts. The specifications for pingbacks exist, but the documentation is severely lacking. There seem to be no tutorials out there implementing such a feature and the documentation only describes how it should work, and provides no examples to work off.

The admin panel was another point of concern. In many ways, the admin panel needs to be as functional as the main part of the website. Initially working off phpMyAdmin, I quickly grew tired of this and coded up my own admin platform in a weekend. Needless to say it was poorly coded and cost me another weekend improving it.

It still didn’t work properly, and my next option was a little more cleaver. I would use the WordPress database and admin panel, and modify my code to use as a frontend. With the help of a little plugin to clear the cache, I had a brilliant system.

After spending time considering my options, I decided to move across to WordPress completely. I have an upcoming project that I expect to release sometime before then end of March, and over the next few months it will command quite a bit of my attention. While I’m working on this, I still want my blog to be up and running – and outsourcing development seems to be the best thing to do.

That’s not to say that my blog was a complete waste of time. I’ve learnt a fair bit about the optimisation and caching of my code that I’ll be able to put forward into different projects and I’m currently open sourcing the code I have so that others can use/adapt it to their own needs.