Brief report on the WordPress upgrade. Look for issues, win prize.

Silence the last couple of months has been due to an upgrade of the entire XProgramming site to WordPress. The work was done by E.Webscapes Design, owned by Lisa Sabin-Wilson, author of WordPress for Dummies. It looks to have been a success, though of course this is just the first few hours.

I asked to have this done because I noticed that even for serious articles, I was tending to use these blog pages rather than the XProgramming core pages, because it is easier to enter articles in WP than in my home-grown XML toolset. The plan was to do a bulk conversion of the whole site, preserving all the look and feel, and then address look and feel later. What I wanted–and what I got–was for Lisa to just make it all happen, with as little involvement as I could possibly have. And she has done that. Essentially I outsourced this project.

The project has not been without pain, which I’ll write about later on. And now, I think we see how it might have been done more incrementally, which might well have resulted in lower cost, faster delivery, and more time to make things actually better. I’ll write about that as well.

What is interesting is that essentially all the issues I have are with the customer, me, not with Lisa or her E.Webscapes staff. I’m happy with the results now, but there were times along the way when I was not happy, primarily because I didn’t know what was going on. If I had run this project like we teach people to run projects, I know I’d have been happier, and I believe I’d have gotten an even better result.

I’ll write about that later. 

Now the prize. The first individual to report any significant problem with the conversion will win a free day with me and Chet, in Brighton Michigan, travel to be paid by the winner.  (Out of town winners may optionally wait until we are in your town, at your own risk. I’m not as young as I once was.)

Send issues discovered to ronjeffries at acm dot org, and put [ron] in as part of the subject of your email.

Thanks!