It took eight hours, but I was able to get WordPress installed and working the way I wanted it to. The famous five minute install worked as promised, but getting the features I wanted working took much longer.

I am a Drupal guy, but I had a new site I wanted to put up and decided to take the plunge into the world of WordPress. I had tried it when it first came out, but was unimpressed. I think most people liked it initially because it wasn't Movable Type.

Anyway, here are the areas I found particularly frustrating in getting WordPress into shape for me:

Themes out of order: I went to the WordPress theme site and searched for a two column, fluid width, widget enabled theme. I received a list of themes, but very few met the criteria. It seems that theme authors tag their themes with everything and then let others sort it out. I searched for pay themes, but many people like eye candy rather than useful themes. I decided on a simple theme, but with the latest upgrade to WordPress the theme would give an error. I was able to work around it.

No popular or similar widgets: It would seem a no brainer that someone would create a simple widget to show similar or related posts and one that showed popular posts.Those don't exist. What does exist are widgets that are complex or factor in many attributes of a post other than simple reads. 

Permalinks and the category attribute: This one was the killer for me. If you use the category tag in your permalink you can kiss a ton of functionality goodbye. The biggest thing you lose is the ability to link to a page with an image on it. I spent two hours looking for workaround or fixes until I finally gave up.

Here are the areas I enjoyed when compared to Drupal:

The five minute install: Simple and easy. Drupal is a little more involved, but WordPress was as simple as creating the MySQL database and use, FTPing the files and running the install.

Theme modification: I had to add the adsense code and it was simple. In less than five minutes I had adsense on the site and placed exactly where I wanted it. In Drupal this is an act of faith and takes much more trial and error.

Admin dashboard: It's laid out much better than Drupal's. Everything is logically placed.

I have another site to bring up on WordPress tonight, but I don't think it's going to take as long.  

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