I finally made the move from WordPress version 1.7 to version 2.8. I’m glad to report that it was painless and trouble free.
Rarely do such large moves between versions go well, but in this case, my faith in the WordPress team was not misplaced.
 Sunday, 6th of September 2009 at 12:27:53 AM Saturday, 24th of May 2008 at 07:41:27 PMWhilst at the Thinking Digital 2008 conference, I had the opportunity to speak to many people including some very influential bloggers and journalists. During a conversation with Mike Butcher of UK TechCrunch, I started talking about developer communities and how important it was to support mobile application development. We discussed my experience of operator apathy towards third party developers and how much of an uphill struggle it was and still is to get people to consider the space seriously. Immediately I was reminded of an interview I gave to ComputerWeekly, following the launch of Source O2 (an O2 business now sadly defunct.) It was part of a month long PR drive to push O2‘s commitment to mobile application developers and to deliver an i-Mode style service, which we named O2 Revolution. I’ve had the opportunity to work with the finest software developers in the World and I know what is required to make great software on virtually any platform. My exuberance and passion for the Source O2 programme and the goals we were trying to achieve, prompted the journalist to call me the developers’ Patron Saint. I immediately laughed-off the comment and used the full power of the O2 press office to ensure the article was serious and noteworthy. Click to continue reading ““..The Patron Saint of Mobile developers..”” Friday, 16th of May 2008 at 08:31:33 PMBetween 1996 and 2004 I spent over €10million of corporate money on various CMS systems, from proprietary solutions like Apple’s WebObjects, to Broadvision, to Interwoven and even Microsoft’s CMS solution. There was even a solution that made use of Microsoft’s Word as a front-end, so that journalists wouldn’t have too steep a learning curve.
In the area of CMS I was persuaded to use WordPress, a blogging tool which can actually run an entire site aswell as blogs. It can even run full blown e-commerce web stores. I must confess that my scepticism gave way to a gung ho mentality and without much of a plan, I decided to migrate my website to WordPress for every single page. Despite having a legacy of pages to deal with and a tenacious attachment to the site’s previous look and feel, I went full steam ahead with abandon. After doing things in the wrong order and then having to gen up on several new areas, including CSS, PHP, Unix and object oriented programming, the work was done. The effect was incredible. Not only did I completely detach my website from the dependency it had on my laptop for content changes/editing, but it was now a true child of Web 2.0 technology. One thing that really makes all of this hang together is the community that surrounds any good Web 2.0 technology. WordPress has a die hard fan base with an almost religious zeal to see their software enter some mythical hall of software fame. I’ve built large developer communities in the past, most notably for O2, but nothing can compare to the passion and commitment I have seen in the WordPress forums and associated plug-in sites. For the first time in a long time, I can actually appreciate a shift in the technological balance of power. Web based applications like Photoshop Express, Mindmeister, WordPress, Google Docs et al., will soon challenge the status quo. |
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