I haven’t used WordPress much, but so far so good (mostly). The install page mentioned “the Famous 5-minute install.” I didn’t time it, but I bet it was pretty close to that. I am pretty amazed at how easy it was to setup. And the options and customizability is great, far better than blogger.
I was very surprised by the number of plugins available. I knew WP had plugins, but you can find one for just about anything. The only problem is many are not up to date with the latest release just like Firefox’s extensions. But unlike Firefox extensions, nothing blocks the install of non-working extensions except the PHP errors you will get when you try to use it.
I am finding the “rich” post editor a bit annoying. In Firefox the cursor is a bit jumpy sometimes. I am used to writing post HTML by hand so I have switched to the non-rich mode. In rich mode I keep having troubles with extra tags or not enough tags and constantly have to edit the raw HTML to fix it.
I already mentioned what I think of the default WP themes in my second post. Since there is only one decent default theme it is way overused by bloggers so it gets boring. And I wonder why the Dashboard skin is nicer than the default blog skin anyway. I like the simple blue theme of the admin pages.
And where is the spell checker? I was pretty surprised to not be able to find the spell check button when I first started using WP. I figured it must be there somewhere. How could they release it without one? My spelling isn’t that good and I would prefer not to look like an idiot who can’t spell when I post. Firefox not having a spell checker I can understand (but in 2.0 they are supposedly adding one), but this is like Thunderbird not having a spell checker. That would be insane. It probably isn’t as critical to spell correctly on your blog as it is in business emails, but still any publishing tool should have a spell checker installed by default.
As I said before, there are lots of plugins for WP so now I have Live Spell Checker. It also works on comments which is pretty nice. But it doesn’t work quite right with the rich editor. It was about the only one I found that said it worked with WP 2.0. It uses Google for spell checking so the spell check interface is very similar to Gmail. But it wrapped lines and caused the raw HTML to display in a box above the rich text editor. At least the comment checker part doesn’t even work right on the author’s webpage (with Firefox). It does work ok with non-rich mode though.
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