Web Developer Musings

With a huge choice of free blogs available it was a long process finally selecting one to power this website. Many open source applications are too fat or outdated and so like many I have often used Wordpress as a basis for many sites as it ticks most of the boxes you could want. However, as it increases in size (both file and user base) I find it is becoming less desirable for a small website application.

Developing with Wordpress has become too complicated for me. Finding what you need to modify can be a nightmare, usually needing a long trawl through a myriad of deprecated files and functions and the super-size community often means no response to your SOS plea. So as much as a fan of Wordpress' new interface and the flexibility it has I no longer enjoy working with it.

Pixie was built by Scott Evans of Toggle; a small UK based web, branding and packaging company. I chose it not because of its interface (which is good) or plug-ins but because it was easy to work with. The power is not found embedded within functions functions but as a simple file structure and code attractive to any intermediate PHP developer. It's an elegant structure I found worked well for my light blogging needs, without resorting to a bare-bones package and building up.

This site was built as a combination of Pixie and ForumCMS. The administration-side is Pixie and the front-end is my own which means I don't have to learn any new template commands and any extra functionality needs no reference to documentation. The site took around 1 week to build over a few spare hours and I didn't once get stressed.