WordPress 2.5 Versus WordPress.com
With all the buzz around WordPress 2.5 you might think I would have rushed to upgrade. Yes, I am a geek, and yes I also love playing with the latest shiny gadgets and toys, but hold on, there is more to it than simply installing every update that comes along.
The fact is, whenever there is any significant update to blogging software, inevitably something breaks. To get all the gizmos we desire there are often hacks, template tricks and not-so-standard plugins that we like to cruft our blogs up with. Those are always the first to break.
WordPress are doing their best to help. There is a growing list of plugins and their 2.5 compatibility. If you look down you might find there are a good number that still don’t work.
It’s good to know which plugins work and which do not, but it becomes a pain to keep changing, trying, finding alternatives. Many programmers put out one version of a plugin and then find it is too much trouble to support it. Some of my most used features will have to be sacrificed or I will need to fix them up myself, or hire a programmer.
This is where the lure of fully-hosted solutions like WordPress.com become attractive. They keep the software up to date, they manage the hosting. No more worries about Digg front page stories putting your site offline. No more expensive or cheap and unreliable hosting. Security, stability, features and management are all handled on your behalf.
What you sacrifice of course is control and flexibility. You can pay for a domain, and some amount of visual tweakage, but you can’t put any old plugin or widget in there. And there lies the rub. While I do not need the ability to show advertising, and they do allow business blogs, they are a bit funny about pushing the boundaries of commercial use, plus I need my gizmos.
I don’t want to give up my many wonderful WP toys! Please Matt and Co, give us a geeked-up pro version of the hosted WordPress.com service so I can get off this update cycle for good!
Related posts:
- A Digital Book for a Digital Ghost
- The End of the Ebook?
- Top 5 Community Building WordPress Plugins
- Should Google Have a “People Search”?
- Joy and APIness
Posted on April 10, 2008 by Chris Garrett
Filed Under Blogging
Comments
5 Responses to “WordPress 2.5 Versus WordPress.com”
Leave a Reply
- Using Mind Maps for Creativity, Note-Taking and Productivity
- Announcing the Creative Commons PDF Converter
- The Freelancer's Toolset: 100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly Need
- Announcing PostWisdom for FireFox: Your Personal Blog Writing Coach
- Adobe
- Blogging
- Cogniview
- Collaboration
- Content Licensing
- Copywriting
- Creative Commons
- Enterprise 2.0
- Excel
- Excel Template
- Excel Tips
- Funny
- IT
- Methodology
- Microsoft
- Office 2.0
- Productivity
- Sad
- Series
- Uncategorized
- Video Tutorials
- Web 2.0
-
Keep this site going
Subscribe with RSS
Spot on. I would definitely consider a pro geek version of wordpress.com hosting.
Isn’t the pain of running your own blog part of the required experience for meta bloggers?
I hear you there. I’m currently on Wordpress.com and am looking at Wordpress.org, but alas I’m geeky enough to do everything on my own, so that scares me abit. Also you need to pay a hosting site to use WP.org. Maybe as you say a pro-wp.com version might be useful.
@Thord - Well if you agree there is definitely something in it
@Jack - Possibly but that doesn’t mean *all* your blogs have to have that pain?
@Gus - Geeking around is fun, but when you HAVE to do it then it becomes a chore
Interesting article as my web host is just about to expire - I run 3 wordpress.org sites - none of which are particularly commercial - so I’m thinking about switching back to wordpress.com. However I have come to appreciate the full flexibility of the .org system. I need to weigh up the benefits v the costs of web hosting…