Why Wordpress?

Posted on January 6th, 2008 by Carlos

I remember discovering WordPress by accident, I was new to the blogging platform and at that moment a client asked to integrate a blog with his existing website, after doing some research between different platforms I decided to go with Blogger (before Google acquisition).

Blogger was easy enough to setup and had the basic features that anybody (at that time) needed to create a Daily Journal.

I even create a couple of blogs in Blogger myself (post Google acquisition) to share photos and news with family located in different parts of the world, its integration with Picasa and the Hello service made Blogger a very easy tool to share memories.

As a web developer , I always wanted to go the extra mile and explore new platforms, I’ve looked at WordPress and installed a copy of their software in one of my servers and I thought there was nothing special about it, ” just another WordPress blog”…until a friend of mine asked for a simple website where he can show his condo on the beach and rent it out trough the website using a custom calendar and form for his customers. I spent a whole Sunday afternoon Googling about the different possibilities that I had to develop this website without spending too many hours (very limited budget) and achieving the goal that my friend wanted for this website, WordPress seemed to be the choice for this project, great plugin support, huge online community and easy enough to understand and learn the code in a short period of time.

This was the Before/After WordPress, my friend got his site with all this features and more…everything changed in the way that I develop websites, it is very rare that I recommend using a different platform to my clients, I was an avid Flash developer since Flash 4 was released in early 1999, I went trough all the iterations of Flash & Cold Fusion (Flash Remoting), developed complex applications and stunning presentations but nothing got my attention more than a zip file containing the now famous sidebar.php, header.php, index.php and so…

I have to thank WordPress for teaching me PHP language and CSS, XHTML markup.

Page templates possibilities, custom loops, hacks, categories, web services integration and the possibility of have infinite blogs (CMS) in one WordPress installation make this my platform of choice. With the new so called Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and Jquery popping out all over the web, I’ve realized I can take advantage of this and include them in my WordPress themes, the result of this is the PressTheme series , a series of high quality WordPress themes to be released in the coming weeks, mediaPRESS will be the first of this series with innovative features and the high quality graphics that mediaCORE Studios provides.

if you are curious about the WordPress endless possibilities, head to their website and download a copy of the software.