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I made the decision several days ago that I would move my blog onto WordPress after finding lots of flaws in the blog software I was using before. The troubles started with the fact that my VPS supplier had mySQL version 3 installed which was not going to work with the latest WordPress version. I contacted webintellects and the very nice people in support went in and upgrade up to 4.something.

I had originally ignored WordPress because I believed that the hosted version worldpress.com was the only option. When I discovered that there was a version you could download and that it was also written in PHP I could not get it installed quick enough. I installed it onto a secondary site so that I could have it running alongside the previous simplephpblog installation. WordPress has the ability to import from a range of older sources including from a RSS feed from another blog. This allowed me to move all my posts over without too much hassle.

The next stage was picking a template which I could use as a starting point WordPress has quite a few built in links and the largest is here. You can filter down the available templates (as there are thousands) and preview them before you download. I downloaded a few that looked workable and installed them which again a simple enough process of uploading into the right directory and away you go.

The only issue really is that the quality of the CSS and the PHP code in the majority of these templates is poor, but hey your getting them free so you cant grumble. If you want something more professional there is a section on TemplateMonster for WordPress themes which all look very slick. But as I didnt opt for this route I cant comment on the quality of the code behind the scenes.

It is also possible to extend WordPress with a range of plugins that are also a complete doddle to install. I havent found anything that is a ‘must have’ but WordPress come pre-installed with a couple including the spam blocking plug-in.