I recently migrated my blog from Octopress to WordPress, and since the opposite seems much more common, I figured I’d document why I went the other way:
- The Octopress environment is a pain to set up. On OSX 10.8 it required jumping through a lot of hoops including installing rvm and compiling gcc from homebrew because XCode’s gcc can’t compile the ruby that Octopress needs. This shouldn’t be necessary to generate HTML.
- I don’t really like Markdown. You have to handle “uploading”/cropping/resizing images yourself, and Markdown doesn’t provide good ways to lay them out.
- There’s no concept of drafts/previews/publishing. When you deploy, you deploy everything, and the publication date is the date it was started, not finished. This also means that there’s no way to easily have a preview for editing or review.
- There’s no concept of scheduling. This makes sense due to the static design, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a limitation that I don’t have with WordPress.
- You can’t edit online from anywhere. It has to be your computer or one with your private key that is set up, which brings us back to #1. With WordPress I can easily log in from other computer (I’m on a relative’s laptop right now), and write in a nice fullscreen editor.
It took me a bit to figure out how to import my Octopress posts into WordPress, so for anyone looking to do the same, I found FeedWordPress to be quite helpful.
Feel free to let me know why you love Octopress or hate WordPress; perhaps I’m missing something!