A move to WordPress

[El Gordo]

I've been toying with the idea of moving away from the hand-coded HTML site for some time. It has a sort of quaintness value, but I fancy the relative simplicity of a proper content management system (CMS). I've mentioned Drupal a few times, which is (IMO) the champion of CMSs. Trouble is, after playing with it for months, on and off, I've decided it's a bit of an octopus, and possibly more than I need just at the moment.

So I've transferred all my content into WordPress. I've done almost no formatting or customisation yet, but the base site can be seen here --
http://www.runningcommentary.net/wp . (The Drupal version, in the basic out-of-the-box style is at http://www.runningcommentary.net/new .)

At some point I'll change over to the standard URL, but I'm finding it hard to let go just at the moment.

A few points:

The forum will be unchanged.

You will notice, if you search for something, that a lot of forum posts appear as well as my posts. The reason for this is: in my Drupal period, I experimented with a Drupal forum, and imported all the content from the forum into the Drupal db. These were stored as just more content, along with my posts. When I imported everything into the WordPress db, they came along too. I'm going to delete them, but of course they will all still be visible here in the forum. Some of the forum posts (I think the ones that start a thread only) are also included in the little word-count widget. So this figure will come down as they get removed. I don't want to delete them all manually, so plan to do this at the database end. I'm just nervously refreshing my long-dormant SQL skills to make sure I don't break everything.

Look and feel -- there is plenty of work to do here. I've gone for a simple theme so that I can tart it up. What would people like to see in the interface? Is it about time I got rid of all the existing decoration, or should I port over a few of these familiar items?

Do people want links to other places? Or should we remain a Bhutan of the web world?

Banner. I'm thinking it would be good to create a brand new banner, for the site header. Perhaps a collage of pics of the usual suspects? Or should it be more neutral? Any thoughts?

Retain Twitter?

Part of the problem is that I'm still not sure what the site is really about. Or what it's for. I wrote an item recently called "Where have all the plodders gone?", but didn't post it. The gist was that everyone apart from me seems to have got rather good at this running game. Which is grand, but it sort of changes the landscape a bit.

Anyway, if anyone has any thoughts on that, or any requests, or complaints.... you know what to do.

Hmm, that sounded a bit ruder than intended....