It was over a year ago when I was planning to move away from Simple PHP Blog to a more robust blogging engine. Many suggest that I just switch over to one of the many free-hosted blogging sites. I like having my blog hosted on my own server. The fact that I have full control over it gives me piece of mind. I’ve been playing around with Flatpress, a variant of WordPress that uses a flat-file database to store its contents. Flatpress worked well but I felt the development for it was slow and the online community was small. I was adamant about staying away from a blogging engine that required a separate database such as MS or Mysql. I thought it would be too much of a hassle to setup and maintain. The past few weeks I’ve been testing out the latest version of WordPress and I must say it is much easier to manage than I had expected. So I have now dropped Flatpress for testing and now focused WordPress.
What really sold me on WordPress is the vast amount of plugins that are available. I was worried about transferring my movie reviews over and keeping its rating system. With the WordPress Widgets customizing and arranging your content couldn’t be any easier. So for the next few weeks as I upgrade my server from Windows 2003 to 2008 WordPress will be replacing my old blogging platform.