WordPress: famous 5 minute install, 2 days of head beating
For WordPress, the “famous 5 minute install” is not something I would be so proud of. Yes the basic install is quick, but I spent about two days on and off getting things working like I wanted to.
After procrastinating for over a year I’ve finally started using my blog. I had previously designed a layout with Movable Type 3.x, basically it looked similar to what you see here but it sat unused. I looked at it again and was going to upgrade the version of MovableType but thought more about what blog software to go with, and with some advice from others decided to switch to WordPress.
As for the Famous 5 minute install, people who care about 5 minute anything are going to use a blog service. For a new user like me there is going to be a lot of confusion what to do after the basic install. Yes there is some documentation and the DashBoard page prompts you to select a different Presentation Theme but then what? For me at that point Google was the most helpful tool for solving problems, sometimes it lead back to WordPress documentation, often not.
I expect most people who want to do a blog well are going to to want to go to the next level of customization and that is when the new user is going to feel very naked. Once I started poking around my biggest disappointment with WordPress was the obscure, poorly written and hard to read style sheets and php theme files. Quite a few of the standard theme files look like they have just been hacked around by different people, use terrible indenting and formatting, inconsistent mixing up of units, like pixels, ems, %, etc. So what do I do? Of course I took an ugly mess and hacked on it a little and left it that way :-)
I had been a little dumbfounded with MovableType and how simplistic it was with database support, but I liked how quickly a naive user like me could hack on it to get it going — meaning customizing a site design not just the install. I do think WordPress is the right choice for me, but they need to focus not on the 5 minutes installs but on reducing the next two days of work people may have to do…
