How can you not figure out how to make a new Wordpress theme (HTML/CSS) but yet roll your own which will obviously include a theme of its own (HTML/CSS)? While I agree a basic blog system is not hard to write, I think the author just wanted to write his own to be able to talk about it. Making a new theme was one of the first things I did with Wordpress years ago. It took all of five minutes to see how it was done and put the design I had into its own theme. His design is very unoriginal anyway, there's probably even a pre-made theme for WP that would have worked.
I don't agree. I'm not a fan of bloated software (i.e. features I don't use, etc.), but one thing that Wordpress and Typepad have going for them is a large user base that helps to uncover bugs like security flaws.
Rolling your own, while a good exercise, will most likely lead to problems.
whatever happened to the "focus on the business" mindset? It seems building your own blog past the basics a frame work can do would eventually be more work then just using wordpress.
Unless your businesses is blogging perhaps your efforts are better spent elsewhere.
What does this have to do with business? Making a blogging app is a great way to learn a new framework/language/development technique (say, test-driven development) that you might have been wanting to explore.
It seems obvious it falls into the category of pleasure, not business.
Now, that said, feel free to tinker so you can learn Rails/Django/whatever, but please please please add support for Akismet or other robust spam filtering. Don't make spammers rich with your ignorance.
This is horrible advice and smacks of NIH syndrome.
How did this get modded up so high?
Ok, so instead of focusing on other aspects of your main business, let's reinvent the wheel and waste 3 months when we could have had the thing set up in 3 days?
Although I am currently running on WordPress, I tend to agree. I find I haven't really tweaked my blog to my liking very much, simply because I am not very proficient in PHP and I have no interest in learning it or the WP specific aspects. Also, I am hindered by the security apsects of hosting WP and the multiblog problems, so I still haven't added the ability to even upload images (currently using the debian hack for multiblogs, but it doesn't provide for per blog content directories). The task to redesign my blog gets delayed indefinitely.
Also, when I think about cool things a blog could do, it is an even greater hurdle to get into WP plugin development. Would be much easier to do it with my own framework. Also, the WYIWYG editor of WP seems to suck anyway.
The only rationale for learning to write WP plugins would be to create something that could become wildly popular (similar to "you have to have a Facebook app", maybe you also have to have a WP plugin).
Although I'm generally leaning this way I don't think it is for everyone. I'm currently using serendipity with a whole block of custom code duck taped on for the non-blog areas of my personal site.
When I put that code together it did everything I wanted and seemed to be fairly flexible. That was over a year ago now and I'm again considering a complete rewrite because making even small changes is just too painful.
If you can clearly see how you'll be using your site a year from now then rolling your own may work well for you. If not then you may come to regret not taking the time to leverage an existing project.
