Wordpress tips, tricks and tools

Wordpress vs Serendipity

This is the battle of convenience and ease of use versus a well known platform which is highly expandable.  Today’s applications to be reviewed are Serendipity and Wordpress respectively.  Lets start by saying that Serendipity is a blogging application written in PHP and is able to handle may ways to store data, the user interface is simple but powerful and has many features which you might not expect to find in such blogging tool; Wordpress in the other hand is highly recognized for being a powerful blogging tool capable of being expanded through a extensive plugin library; lets take a look at the features that make Serendipity so convenient and Wordpress so flexible.

Admin Layout and Appearance:

Those who are used to pretty admin areas such as the ones featured in Movable Type, Expression Engine, etc. might not like how Serendipity’s admin area is arranged, users basically have a left sidebar where they are able to access the various functions of Serendipity, there are four major areas which are:  The entries section which provides access to content management sections such as “new entry, edit entry, comments and categories”.  The section you will spend most of your time working on is the “new entry” section which allows you to publish content through a WYSIWYG editor, this tool is not as powerful as the one found in Wordpress though so you might be a little disappointed there, however you do have access to some basic text formatting  tools which let you control the way your text is shown.

The next section is called “Media” and provides direct access to a management system which lets you upload files to your blog for easy publishing, Wordpress has a similar area however it needs to be expanded through plugins to get the most out of it, a good example would be installing the “Picnik” plugin for easy picture management and modification.

Storefront Appearance:

As you might have imagined, this is one part where Serendipity falls short compared to Wordpress, while there are several Serendipity skins available you just can’t beat the thousands of themes available for Wordpress.  Some users argue that they would much rather work with Serendipity because one of its features allows users to easily modify the sidebar’s configuration through easy to use plugins; however in newer Wordpress versions the blogging tool uses what are called “widgets” which allow users to place any type of content on the blog’s sidebar without the need to modify the PHP code.

Plugins:

This is a big area for both blogging platforms, Wordpress has a very extensive library of plugins which is why it is so flexible and preferred by many users, however the installation process might not be very attractive.  In Wordpress you need to download the plugin, unzip it and then uploaded to your plugin’s folder and finally activate it in the plugin management tab; Serendipity on the other hand uses a very nice tool called “Spartacus” which allows you to install plugins directly from their online repository, there is no need to download or upload anything to your webserver (this is a great feature for non-technical users)

Databases:

Wordpress is able to work with MySQL but Serendipity can work with the same database system in addition to PostgreSQL and SQLlite database backends, this gives users more options if they are not able to access MySQL

Upgrades:

This is an area where Serendipity is great, compared to Wordpress the re is just a two step upgrade process, you basically have to back-up your database and then overwrite some files using an FTP tool; in Wordpress you need to back-up the database, deactivate all plugins, overwrite your files, run the upgrade script and finally reactivate the plugins one at a time to make sure everything is working fine.

The bottom line is that if you do not use specialized plugins available only for Wordpress, Serendipity is a very nice and simple blogging tool to try and as many users say when referring to Serendipity “It just works”.

Wordpress vs pMachine

pMachine was a blogging application which dates back to 2003, in fact this was the base version of what is known today as the Expression Engine.  pMachine was developed by Ellislab, back then this great blogging tool already had several functions which were kept and fine tuned into Expression engine, some of them are the ability to manage multiple blogs and keep their profile separate as well as their behavior for user interfaces, forum modules were already included in pMachine and kept in Expression Engine, lets take a look at the features that pMachine offered back then in comparison with Wordpress.

Admin Interface:

The administration interface for pMachine was very simple, definitively not what it is today’s Expression Engine however several features were transferred and better organized in recent versions however some features were lost during the transition and in order to patch those holes Expression Engine created several plugins but as far as the admin setting and visual configuration Expression Engine was improved from its previous version (pMachine)

Lost Features:

As we have mentioned the transition from pMachine to Expression Engine was not completely smooth since some features had to be left out, one of them was called pMachine’s pBlocks, this feature allowed pMachine to rotate content throughout the blog, for instance a user might have had a series of headers which needed to be rotated every time the user change pages, with this feature each file was shown after a page reload, several other file types were allowed to rotate throughout the site, in Expression Engine the only solution is to use a plugin referred to as a randomizer which rotates “small” content.

Wordpress has many plugins and utilities which allow users to rotate all types of content during visits, this functionality can be added to a blog using the right plugin because as you may know Wordpress ships with only a couple of default plugins.

Useful Features Kept:

One of the useful features which were kept during the upgrade is the mailing lists were administrators are able to send emails to all of the contacts and members who have provided their email addresses during registration, this useful feature is able to keep track of emails sent to the group in what is called a cache.  This feature is actually not found in Wordpress but as any other feature it can be added with a custom plugin.

pMachine’s search engine was also kept and improved in Expression Engine since it is quite effective for small keyword searches, it is very fast as well; Wordpress also has built in search engines which allow visitors to find the content they are looking for fast, in some cases the search engine may not work due to outdated themes or installations.

The statistics feature was kept as well, some of the stats which pMachine users were able to show are: the number of members, comments, weblog entries, most popular weblog entries, etc. pMachine administrators were also able to show lists of entries submitted by each member in their profile page.

As you see there have been several functions and features kept while upgrading from pMachine to today’s Expression Engine, when you compare EE with Wordpress the only obstacle you might have to overcome is Expression Engine’s pricing, besides that EE is a great blogging tool to use.