In early December 2007 I moved over two thousand posts from over four years of blogging from the Blogger blogging platform to WordPress. While it was a bit of a struggle getting all the images and the Haloscan comments over it was worth the effort. Moving to WordPress was the best blogging move I’ve ever made. Blogger was a great platform to start with but WordPress has allowed me so much more flexibility.
I don’t normally write posts about the process of blogging, so you may be wondering why I’m singing the praises of WordPress today. WordPress is turning seven today.
One of the great benefits of WordPress is that it’s Open Source so it’s built by a huge community rather than a company with a small team of designers offering a product. That means that there are literally millions more themes (templates) and usable features than on any other platform.
Since our last birthday we’ve doubled theme downloads to over 10 million, and doubled plugin downloads to 60 million. Most importantly, we continued to grow the development community to 1,528 people active on Trac and 13 committers, both numbers the highest in the history of WordPress.
That’s 1,528 people pouring their hearts and souls into GPL software we all own, we all build on, we can use as we please, we can all make better. We’ve evolved from a simple script to a web platform.
I mentioned that I had a few struggles in the move from Blogger. That was really only because I was using a third party solution for comments. For most people making the switch is absolutely seamless. For the exceptions to the rule, like me, you’ll find, just as I did, that there are countless WordPress enthusiasts ready to lend a hand. In my case a guy named Justin spent a very long time making sure all my comments transferred over. He wasn’t part of WordPress, he was just a fellow blogger who was part of an extremely helpful community.
If you want to move your blogging to the next level maybe it’s time to consider joining the WordPress community. You won’t regret it.
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