… to redo my site and move my blog. Or something like that.

I’ve taken the decision to switch both my site and the old blog to a single platform, so have been looking at the CMS ecosystem. I tried WordPress, probably the most popular CMS, and while it’s simple, has loads of plugins, it just never felt easy to setup and configure on Windows, despite the Web Platform Installer. There were always additional Windows permissions to set, and then errors which made no sense. The next look was Orchard, which was certainly easier to install, but did give me grief in a number of areas and some things just didn’t work as I expected. I hit one show-stopping bug that took the entire site down (hint: don’t disable the Feeds module) and had to dig around for a long time to work out how to get the site back. As part of that digging I downloaded the source and wow, confusing. It’s clearly very flexible, but to my simple desires appears massively over-engineered. Maybe it needs that to get flexibility, but it just feels more complex. But, I stuck with it for a while and even switched my site over to it, then decided to switch back to WordPress because it’s much simpler and just feels easier to work with. I may play with themes over the next few weeks – I’ve already tweaked this one a little – but essentially I think I’m going to stick with it.