Ben’s Workshop Is Being Updated

I’m in the process of switching blogging platforms from Drupal to WordPress. The decision wasn’t an easy one as it will take many weeks to make the full transition. Eventually I should have all my content moved here to the new site, until then if you want to see the old site go to:
http://oldshop.electronsmith.com

Beware that the site will not look the same, I had to revert back to the default Drupal theme to get it to work properly at the new address. Also images in many of the older posts are broken. I’ll try to make as many of the post links work as I can, but the old photo links will probably always be broken (e.g. my posts on G+ that link to my site).

The RSS feed should be back in a few days also.

Please be patient.

Update 1: I fixed the broken photo links in G+

Update 2: For anybody that is interested here’s why I decided to switch.

I was sick of Drupal updates taking 15 minutes or more and parts of my site breaking every time I would update a module. WordPress updates and WordPress plugin updates are a simple click. Sure sometimes things break when you update a WordPress plugin, but after running other WordPress sites for many years, I’ve never had a problem with a wordpress update.

Drupal is very powerful, but it requires too much fiddling. I struggled trying to get a feature like comment notification working correctly. Just about all of the tools that you need for blogging already work properly on WordPress or are a simple plugin away. In the end I spent way too much time on the site and not enough time writing content.

WordPress still has it’s share of problems. The lack of slideshow capability for self-hosted sites is disappointing. There are plenty of slideshow plugins, but most of them do not use the built in image handling and require creating a gallery and then attaching it to a post. I’ve found a solution to this, but it has required many days of tweaking to get it right.

I’m not ditching Drupal altogether, I think it is a phenomenal platform. It just wasn’t the right fit for this blog.