I’m now using the release WordPress 1.0 to generate the content area of this weblog. (The headers, footers, site navigation, and subscription list are generated by ShearerSite.)

In many ways, it’s going from one extreme to the other. My own system is based on static rendering without a database, to the point that the original data itself is kept in RSS-compliant XML files on the site, and HTML files are generated from those. So there’s no programmatic server overhead for retrieval, but there is for authoring, since all the dependent pages have to be re-rendered on the spot. I’m still a fan of this type of system, but I wanted to try something different. WordPress is about as different as you can get: by default, it runs a battery of regular expressions--dozens upon dozens of them--over each post to format it at retrieval time. (Some kind of static caching may be on its way, though, judging from hints in the database schema.) The administration interface is mostly very good, making it much easier to perform administration tasks such as adding new categories than my homegrown config-file-based system did.

Pros of WordPress: very hackable (the good way, by the site owner); terrific setup routines; good navigation controls, easy to set up; well-rounded feature set.

Cons: frequently passes HTML through finicky regular expressions; too much use of addslashes() for my taste, including some double applications; a few bugs in 1.0 (though, to be fair, 1.0.1 final is imminent).

Some changes I made to my own copy include:

• Improvements for source code posting, as well as XHTML validity. Made some changes in the regular expressions in the wptexturize and wpautop filters. Unmodified, they kept turning some my posts into invalid XHTML by adding an extra </p> tag. I also had some problems with snippets of source code that I posted. WordPress’s filters would get too smart, and try to produce curly quotes around strings, as well as em dashes before AppleScript comments. They would also tend to double-space the code, because newlines were turned into <br /> and a newline by wpautop, and the pre element honors both. I modified the code so that any filter could (optionally) avoid <pre> sections in the content, letting them go through unmodified. I did this using a loop and, much as I hated to add them, two more regular expressions.
• Site-relative blog home page links, to handle my unorthodox split-directory setup.
• Minor permalink change, to send out two-digit days and months.
• RSS import and synchronization. (I already contributed my RSS 0.9/1.0/2.0 import and sync. code to the WordPress project, but it was far too near the 1.0 series’ release date to make it in.)