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Bill Brown

A complicated man.

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Long-time readers will know that I am slowly moving my sites from UplinkEarth to DreamHost—way too slowly, in fact, since I am paying $29.90/month for one and $19.95/month for the other—and simultaneously trying to set up a CMS to handle everything.

I’ve flitted about between different systems, liking this feature of one but this feature of another one. Last year, I finally decided to go with TextPattern. TXP, as its called, is an excellent CMS that implements separation of content from presentation and a page model that sits well with me. When I decided on it back in October, I was floored by how much better of an implementation it was than anything else out there (and I evaluated at least a dozen CMSs and perhaps five seriously).

I really liked WordPress, but it didn’t meet my needs as a blogger and an essayist. There’s just so many different types of content at the Bill Brown Information Center that WordPress’s one-admin-per-blog and one-blog-per-directory limitations were too much. In fact, I ended up using it for Found on the Web and I couldn’t be happier with it.

We’re now halfway through February and TextPattern’s 1.0 release has been delayed repeatedly with the last announced release date being January 10th, 2005. I can’t wait forever for what could end up being a third release candidate bundled up as 1.0. In the meantime, WordPress released version 1.5 and the new version offers static pages, a major requirement of bbrown.info.

Do I remain in limbo waiting for a single developer in France to decide to finish up the 1.0 release and risk finding out that it’s the same as the 1.0rc2 that’s out there with a few bugfixes? Or do I prepare the migration of bbrown to WordPress with its several developers, active development, and vibrant community, hacking in what bits don’t fit?

The decision seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?