I had to move my site to a new host, because my previous hosting company suddenly shut down.

After years of neglect, I decided to take it as an opportunity to update the site as well, but I didn’t feel like doing yet another custom, JSP-based website. Like so many others, I used WordPress instead. The greatest thing about WP is that there are so many plugins and other contributions available. Almost no matter what you want to do, there is a way to do it without having to write a lot of code. In most cases you don’t have to edit a single file.

Coming from a Java background, having helped develop the Servlets, JSP and JSF specifications, I can’t help but wonder why nothing like WordPress evolved based on those technologies. Or have I missed something? I know there are plenty of Java-based CMS’s, but I’m not aware of any that has a sizable community…

For this site I use just the basics: a Twenty Eleven child theme, with some CSS tweaks and custom header and footer templates, plus the Shortcode Exec PHP (for shortcuts that get the base URIs for things like images and other files) and the WP Captcha Free plugins (to see if it really gets rid of spam posts without forcing visitors to enter a captcha). I imported some of the posts from my old sites using the RSS Importer plugin. On another site I also use the Types plugin to create custom types with parent – child relationships.

That will have to do for now, but maybe I’ll play around with some more stuff later on.