Jason Leveille’s Blog

My plan for a long time now has been to move away from Wordpress as my blog engine. Wordpress has been great for me, and it does a lot of things right (for one, it just works and you can be up and running with a blog very rapidly), but it can be a pig. Anyway, I figure that by putting it in writing I’ll start to find the time to get this process started. So, my only decision is what will be my engine. Here is a list of choices that I have considered over the past few months, as well as reasons why I am not going in their direction:

Expression Engine (EE)

I have never built an EE site.  Twice now I have installed 1.6, only to be turned off by the administrative experience.  It seems clunky to me and not very fluid.  With that said, I have heard great things about this software.  I also like what I’ve heard about the framework that powers EE (CodeIgnitor), and I’m especially exited about the looks of 2.0 (where the hell are you).  I’m choosing not to go with EE because in the coming months I will get my fix through work.  I believe there are at least 2 projects coming up where we will be using EE.

CakePHP

I have considered building my blog from the ground up with CakePHP.  I am working on 3 projects now that are powered by CakePHP.  Cake has made me a better developer by keeping me organized (thanks MVC), making me follow conventions (but allowing me to break those conventions where necessary), and providing a host of valuable classes for a variety of tasks.  A lot of which take the mundane out of developing.  Let’s face it, developing can be mundane and repetitive.  I am choosing not to go with Cake because I am getting my Cake Fix at work.

CodeIgnitor and Doctrine

I have considered building my blog from the ground up with CodeIgnitor and Doctrine.  I have virtually no experience with Doctrine, and even less with CI, but I’ve heard great things about both.  Doctrine seems like it rocks the house, and EllisLabs (the guys responsible for CI) seem like they really have their act together.  I am choosing not to go this route because if I am building an app from the ground up, chances are very high that I will be choosing CakePHP.  Until the day comes where someone shows me overwhelming evidence as to why I should be using a framework other than Cake (and yes, I’ve seen Rasums’ presentation on frameworks), than I’ll continue baking.

And the Winner Is Django

Just in case you didn’t get it from my title, I’ll be choosing to go the route of Django for my rebuild.  In the few hours I’ve taken to read Django documentation and play around I have been thoroughly impressed.  The template system is awesome, and the automatic admin generation has me all hot and bothered (though I’ll really get hot and bothered after I give the tires a really good kick).  I’ve wanted to dive into python for a few years now, and I’ve been curious about Django for over a year, so I figure it is a good choice for me.

Anyway, there you have it.  With grad school and everything else I have going on (we have a super secret, earth shattering, take over the world project in the making at work), I just hope I won’t be looking back at this post in 6 months thinking, “what a set of donkey balls I was for writing that.  I haven’t done shit in 6 months”.  If you think you can persuade me to try something other than Django, give it a try.