This post was published 4 years 4 months 12 days ago and as such probably does not reflect my current opinions, knowledge or ability.
So I spent most of my Christmas holidays programming a blogging engine and community site. It was going alright, and with a little more work I could have had it usable, and yet, I’m now sitting with a WordPress blog and no intention of going back.
Why?
First of all I admit there were several flaws with my system. Big flaws. Flaws which I opted to ignore and work around as I continued to build the project. But that isn’t really the point here – I recognised that the structure of the project was terrible and I could have rebuilt it.The real issue here was, “Why did I feel the need to be different?”. There are huge numbers of high quality blogging engines out there, all customisable to do what I wanted. And yet I was sitting working from the ground up, on a low quality piece of software writing PHP I was already comfortable with, just so I could have the satisfaction of saying “Yes, I wrote this slow, insecure, feature lacking site by myself”. It all seems a little ridiculous now.
Not only ridiculous, in fact, but selfish. I could easily have spent that same time contributing to one of many open source blogging projects, learning to create new plugins or themes. Instead however, I was trying to reinvent the wheel.
So, in the end I hope I learned my lesson here – don’t be afraid to benefit from other people’s work, because in turn you can give back to the community. And perhaps you’ll be downloading some of my efforts in the near future.
I do agree that your engine was inferior to WordPress or any one of the many engines out there however you didn’t do it to compete with them. You didn’t really even do it to be yourself, or necessarily to show off from what I gather.
The whole thing is about experience. You now have a much greater knowledge of the way things should work and can more helpfully contribute to another project. If you would have tried before I can almost guarantee that would not have been the case. Agreed, you have lost time and you would have been giving some input and would have been learning while doing it but it’s a balance of how much you learn there and how much you learn by building something from scratch. As it stands you spent a great deal of time on it, you ended up with something that was scrapped, but it wasn’t a waste of time. You still have a (more or less) working blogging engine, as well as other things you worked into it, to refer to and use as example projects.
Anyway, just my viewpoint
Nistur
I’m not so sure… none of the code I wrote on this project was much more complicated than in the original blog I made, it was just on a larger scale. Sure, I worked out how to complete a couple of specific tasks, but in general I think I could have achieved more by experimenting with an existing, larger project on my own.
Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t consider this a waste of time. My PHP programming may not have specifically gained much, but I did learn a lot about the way I work.
It’s just that one of the key things that finally got through to me was not to try and do everything myself just for the sake of doing it.
That’s good then. I just didn’t want you being totally negative about it
However I think doing it this way has taught you a bit more as to why to do things a certain way. If you would have contributed to another project you possibly wouldn’t have that knowledge, just that things are done in that way. In my opinion anyway, that’s very important.
Nistur
Yes, like I said I have learned from it, but mostly general ideas like planning and structure, and that for some reason I saw programming in php totally differently to programming in C++, something which a follow up post will be written on.
However, I think I could have learned far more from seeing PHP being used properly and efficiently by someone experienced, rather than just figuring out a method that gets the job done. I mean, sure, I know how to achieve a lot of things, but I don’t know whether my methods would be the best ways, or even good ways to get things done.
(yes I do check in from time to time) Likewise, at University we were taught Java, and not taught very well I might add. Soon as I started doing jobs in PHP, and working with people not taught in my classes did I realise how amazingly easier things could really be.
I wanted to write my own Content System but didn’t have time so I used wordpress, I learnt so much from the plugins I started to write for people. Now I’m slightly more experienced I think I could write my own, I’ve done most of the new Student Scout and Guide Rally website which is a booking system so write an entire CMS shouldn’t be too hard.
Just wish I could update my site as frequently…..
Hey, great to hear from you.
We’re taught in C++, and I just seemed to forget all the good programming practices I’ve tried my best to pick up as soon as I touch PHP – I’ll cover that in a further post, but now I’ve noticed hopefully I can correct the mistake.
I found writing the actual CMS far easier than I’d imagined – the reading, writing, validating parts, it was when I got down to features like trackbacks for a blog that it started getting tricky – but my overall structure was badly thought out and a mess too. I’m glad to hear you learned a lot from writing plugins, that’s definitely something I want to look at in the near future.
I tried to check your blog (http://allstarmedia.org/ right?) but I got an internal server error.
Anyway thanks for the comment, keep in touch and if you do start work on a CMS, let me know how it goes.
(I hope I can keep updating this frequently…)
I hear you – I had a similar experience, trying to code my own blog rather than bite the bullet and use wordpress. Not trying to rebuild the wheel is a wise thing to do.
Nice blog by the way – love the pink
Well, at least it’s another mistake I’ve gotten out of the way now and hopefully won’t repeat.
Also, thanks
– I’m still kind of uncomfortable having a Barbie pink blog but it’s growing on me. It still feels weird having someone who’s blog I read comment here, all the authors of blogs I follow seem sort of like distant celebrities to me ^.^;
I took my blog down whilst I re-theme, remove old plugins and add new features. I was supposed to be running some business through it by now! Unfortunately I’ve spent the last week writing a camp booking system so it been put on hold.
I’ll probably ping you once I’m done, just for fun.
Great thanks, I’d love to read it when it’s back up.
Heh, with the exception of my blogging software (also using WordPress), I’m guilty on two counts of custom-coding rather than using pre-existing software.
I’m still convinced that my newest project will be different and might be good enough to make it at some point, though.
From the (very) brief introduction to your new project it sounds really interesting – and without your previous experience building a less expansive CMS I guess you wouldn’t know which areas to focus on and exactly what you want from a new one.
Not only have I started re-theming my site I’ve relocated it, caramelwhistle.com, its a perfect anagram of my full name as I needed something to replace my old site address which just wasn’t casual enough for me, or professional enough for a portfolio.
Looks great, I’ll add a link you. The fact it is an anagram of you name is really cool.
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