Wordpress.org

In my previous post I did a little comparison of Blogger and Wordpress.com, both free online services to host your blog with lots of extras. Wordpress however is orginally an application you can install on your own server. This Wordpress is still alive, kicking and available through wordpress.org. I thought it was nice to evaluate this and share my thoughts on my blog. So here we go.

CMS or Blog?
Full fledged Wordpress.org is more than just a blogging tool. You can also make entire websites with it, comparable to Joomla and Drupal. So it is not just a blogging tool but can be seen as a full fledged Content Management System (CMS). For now I'm leaving Joomla and Drupal out of the equation by the way.

Basics
Wordpress is just a pack of files. It requires PHP and MySQL. Installing is quite easy: download, upload to your server (more about server specifics later!), edit wp-config.php: enter MySQL settings and copy-paste some salt'n'pepa, visit the site with your browser and easily complete the install from there. Now you have something that looks a lot like what you see when subscribing through wordpress.com. But in this case, this is really only the beginning!

Themes & Plugins
Wordpress can easily be extended with plugins and themes. Themes take care of the looks of your site, plugins come in all forms and shapes. Many plugins behave as a widget: a small piece of UI/functionality you can customize place in your (side)bar. The availability of themes is extensive, even if you don't want to pay. WordpressThemeBase has a lot of them and provides one-click browsing from one theme preview to the next. Wordpress.org also provides both themes and plugins. And if your not satisfied, just write your own (adjustments).

Installation of themes & plugins
Installation of themes and plugins can be done in two ways. First, you can upload them by ftp. Luckily, every theme or plugin is just a single folder that contains everything it needs. Further configuration can be done in your browser through the dashboard. Much more convenient is installing plugins directly from the dashboard. You can search, preview and download/install them really, really, really easily.  That is, if this works on your host (this type of interaction requires a bit more 'freedom' which is not allowed by every host and sometimes may require a bit of tweaking from your side).

Wordpress.org VS wordpress.com
The huge amount of plugins and themes available if you install Wordpress.org yourself makes all the difference with Wordpress.com. I'd almost say Wordpress.com is bad publicity for what this platform is actually capable of!

Free 
Well, this difference fades a little I guess if you are willing to pay for Wordpress.com, but you don't need to pay for the .org version either, do you? Well... you do need a host that serves your pages. Nowadays there is free PHP/MySQL hosting available, but do they work with Wordpress? I first tried Awardspace, 000webhost and Dreamhost Apps. But I wasn't pleased. The first two were slow and I couldn't get the installation-from-backend to work, 000webhost even banned me from my site for a day. The latter only provides a pre-installed version with a limited set of plugins and themes. They say you can edit your themes but I don't think you can upload stuff.

Space1 troubles
I also tried  a payed hosting provider I am with (Space1), but their MySQL version was too old. They did provide an auto-install for an older version of Wordpress, but I fear that many plugins would be incompatible. And that problem would worsen over time since I also couldn't upgrade Wordpress (because of the MySQL version AND because their php safe mode didn't allow scripts to run long enough for an upgrade to run smoothly).

Finally
Finally, I came across x10hosting. It did take a little bit of guessing to get it uploaded and get MySQL running over there (there's a forum though, with lots of knowledge already available). But once that hurdle was out of the way, everything else worked like a charm, including installing themes and plugins from the dashboard in the browser! Perhaps there will be times the server is slower than it was when I was testing it, but for now it looks like a decent solution. Your url will be a little bit trashy (their words) like blah.x10.mx. But you can connect your own domain if you want to (if you have one). This is of course not much different from Blogger and Wordpress.com.

Perhaps, when the next offspring blog is coming up, I will try and use wordpress.org on x10hosting!