Migration to WordPress

After a long battle with Plone, we have finally decided to migrate the WordPress. When we started, we used Trac, then Plone, and now WordPress. Why the change?

With Plone, we wanted to have a system that can manage membership. For example, members can view their membership status, renew their membership, and be sent notification when membership fees are due. However, Plone doesn’t have this feature built-in, and we don’t have enough expertise to hack Plone. As far as membership management is concerned, we don’t have members in the hundreds, so I have been using a simple excel file to keep track of members and payment.

With Plone, we also wanted a system for event management, and Plone is great for that. The calendaring system rocks. It was tightly integrated with Twitter, so new events that are added will be tweeted out immediately. Posted items are integrated to the mailing list, so any new posting will be sent to the mailing list. The calendar and event system are the only function in Plone that works for us.

So Plone had been used primarily to blog. However, it is a monster. It’s slow, non-intuitive, and even the easiest of tasks such as adding multiple photos to a post seems daunting. This has been a major discouragement, and one of the primarily reasons why we seldom post new stuff (you can point the finger at Mr. Lazy too).

And so we decided to move to WordPress. WordPress has everything we need (we still don’t need the membership management thingamagick). The only exception is the event and calendar system that worked for us in Plone. For that, we chose Google Calendar Event, a really nice and functional plugin for WordPress. It is not as awesome as the one that we have in Plone (as @kakeman has repeatedly pointed out, ad nauseum), but it works. One limitation is that new events that are added are not automatically tweeted. If you know how to integrate Google Calendar with Twitter notification, do let us know.

As for migration from Plone to WordPress, it was a pain in the ass, and will be the subject for another post.

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