Battleangel | Personal

To keep it brief, I’ve just about had it with Mambo over at Silent Nation. The lack of XML-RPC, the hardcoded layout elements, the lack of any sort of tools that makes a blog, like comments, trackbacks etc has gotten to me. For the longest time I held out waiting, scrutinizing the roadmap which supposedly aims to fix at least the layout and the XML-RPC.

So what I’ll do is this. I’ve set up a Wordpress blog over at Fog Of War and started posting there instead. I’ll use an import script to get the Mambo content over to WP and then we’ll see what kind of manual editing is needed. So far I’m very impressed with WP and it is by far the best out-of-the-box solution I’ve seen. Better than Nucleus. Simpler and more streamlined than Mambo. Nucleus has its charms too of course, but many are thanks to extensive tweaking. Less tweaking means more time to write content and that is just what I need. I can’t take up time rewriting some commenting script for Mambo either or hacking core files, as I’ve done in both Mambo and Nucleus. It’s just not any good since it blocks future upgrades and incrementally adds to the woes and workload of adopting future versions. Ideally you just want to log into Fantastico in your control panel and click “upgrade”, no nonsense and no time wasted.

All I need now is a new template but that should be easy enough. Don’t know if I’ll be using both domain names though, one probably goes back into parking after this.

Update: Links and articles were imported without too much hassle. Comments will have to be cut and pasted using phpmyadmin or something. I can’t possibly bother with scripting for a handful of comments. The only snag I ran into was the fact that I got tons of extra \r\n + linebreaks. So I had to pull the database, study, search and replace those instances and inject it again. Looks a lot better now, and since I never used much fancy formatting in Mambo anyway, I think I can leave the old entries as they are. Maybe, if I feel like it, I’ll sort the 130 or so articles by category. Speaking of categories, I did the sensible thing and created geographical areas as categories and sub-categories in Wordpress. Now that certainly works better than Mambo.