My first flirtation with WordPress was in 2009, and I have been a regular user since. It has mostly been an enjoyable experience. Initially, I created a free site on wordpress.com, and quickly dove into the self hosted solution.
Early on (pre 2.0 era) I got hacked. Entirely because I used sketchy plugins from authors who were only a little more sophisticated than myself.
As time has gone on, and I have become (ever so slightly) more sophisticated and diligent, I have had good success with WordPress.
However, recently, an incident that was a throwback to an earlier era threw me for a loop. On the installation for my wife’s page wordsbybarbara there was an included plugin, the Revolution Slider (a slideshow plugin), that I installed, but never used. Sure enough, it got a driveby sideload of a series of malware exploits.
After spending far too many hours cleansing, scanning, cleansing, scanning, and then recreating content, I am getting fed up.
WordPress is a great platform, and the creativity of the community and the team that maintains it has matured greatly. If you stick to using plugins from the WordPress.org repository, and are diligent about doing updates, you will be fine. The theme selection is fantastic, and with some modest CSS and HTML skills, even a duffer like myself can put together a decent looking and functioning site.
But I am beginning to move my main properties away. I just have far less “fun“maintaining it then I used to, and my time is valuable. I have moved my product management blog to the new Ghost platform (with their hosting solution, so I no longer have to futz with the back end), and I am beginning to curate my content here for a similar migration.
I am not sure when Tralfaz will make the switch, as my, uh, discipline with using tags and categories has left something to desire.
I should be cautious. WordPress doesn’t suck. Far from it, it is solid, reliable, well supported with a fabulous community of support, and so many themes/plugins/modifications that you can do pretty much anything you might want. But because of this complexity, it has become a hassle to manage on the back end.
