Let me just say, I love that wordpress (WP) is open source, I love the plugin’s and I enjoy the community. These are the strengths which motivated me to join the WP community and use the software on all my sites, however, there are a couple major issues I have as a mature user.
Communication with us normal users (part geek, part human), the group that enjoy a challenge but aren’t enthusiastic with constant challenge.
I don’t like that podcasting isn’t built in, that ajax has only recently found a place as part of the core install, that the Admin interface is always so impossibly slow (admittedly it did get better w/ release 2.1) and why can’t the software auto-update. It is so so very trying to upgrade over and over.
You have to back up everything, download this, update that, etc. A blogger spends at least half his time taking care of IT stuff. A friend of mine Brendan (Slacker Manager) listed as one of his reasons for leaving 9Rules (a blog network) to b5Media was that he maintained his own blog.
Now Brendan and I haven’t ever gotten into intense detail about our IT backgrounds but on the surface we don’t appear to be materially different and I think since I don’t have b5Media backing me up I may just have to switch.
You may wonder ‘Roger, its not like you have published often lately’ well to be honest at least 50% of the reason is because I have so much work to do on my blog that it was just wearing me out. Its a distraction all this fussing, and my site only looks poorer for it.
Anyway I am sure I will piss off more than a few with my opinions on WP, but I don’t think I am alone. I am only on WP even now because the hosting services until just recently haven’t been good enough to take over.
The services I am looking most closely at are Typepad, TeraPad, and Wordpress.com (WP’s hosted solution)
What about you? Are you ever tempted to leave the WP nest? Do you use another provider? Any suggestions?
