Even there are still several open questions for me I am ready to share my first impressions about WordPress. My first project was a blog for my little daughter . For several reasons I had to implement it in Russian, so I ‘ve got in touch also with localization and plenty of other lovely features.

Advantages

• Really easy installation process.
• Unicode support (critical for me).
• Rich editor for post writing is really a step forward compared to what I’ve seen before.
• Administration panel looks user-friendly and solid. I had not an opportunity to test all the features yet but the part I tested was convenient enough.
• Very flexible posting categorization.

Disadvantages

• According to famous 5-minute install, I have to create a database manually. If I forget to do it in a write encoding WordPress will skip this fact. The outcome will be a boring fight against encoding issues or even a re-installation process. Definetly I have to pay attention to what I’m doing during installation but the consequences are worth to make a small warning for me at that place.
• Working with images in the post is a bit unfriendly and very limited in its functionality. I hope this is covered by correspondent plugins.
• Despite plenty of localization projects most of the skins (even Kubrick template) are delivered without localization possibilities. To translate the interface, say, into russian I have to go through all my files in the skin (they are luckily around 10).

Overall impression

WordPress as a tool seems to be suitable for launch of small blog-based projects. I think I’ll try it in several others in the next months.

Open questions

Here are several points to be clarified in future:

• Upgrading process. How usable it is?
• How to integrate such a tool in an already existing project like Dictator or Diorama.
• Are there any benefits with combining it with Mediawiki? How easy it is?

All this could be cleared only by doing. So…

To be continued.