Goodbye Drupal
On the weekend I replaced my last Drupal site with a WordPress one.
The main reason was that it and one other site had become resource hogs due to spammers. The registration tables were bloated and it felt like my host had downgraded my sites to a slower server.
That plus upgrading drupal is a nightmare of historic fails and plugin inconsistencies.
Although despite the reputation, WordPress conversions are not always smooth sailing. The old nextgen gallery plugin refused to create thumbnails. The forums all implied a memory issue but at 256m it should have been enough. So i went hunting for a new gallery plugin – responsive, stylish, lightbox and few negative reviews. I ended up with Gallerix – that also didn’t auto generate thumbnails but by then I’d had enough and stuck with it. At least you could upload a thumbnail specifically.
Creating custom post types and views was easy with the premium http://wp-types.com/ plugin. I created a different custom type for events, locations, craft and recipes.
But the creme de la creme was the premium http://wphostreviews.com/product/mappress plugin. The wptypes forum had sample code to create a custom maps mashup shortcode that pasted simply into the custom code section. Logically you create a map for each post, and when you filter by custom field, the map applies points of interest from the displayed post.
I haven’t migrated most of the data across yet, but you can see it in action at http://www.halloween-australia.com/trick-or-treat-locations/
The best thing was that the entire site was built through the WordPress admin dashboard. Not a single line of source code had to be edited – it was all configured in the admin screens. A large part of this is the flexibility of my favourite WordPress theme http://my.studiopress.com/themes/prose/ that I use on most of my sites now. Responsive, with tons of hooks for you to paste any CSS overrides, tracking, or additional functions you desire.
So now if you’re walking through your suburb on halloween and you’re not sure how far away the next location is, just use http://www.halloween-australia.com/trick-or-treat-locations/
