I like Wordpress. I hate the slow loading time of the admin side and the code can be shorter but it's the best I got with all its features right now. I've been testing it for a few days now and I started to put together a list of things I need.

I liked the fact that the learning curve was actually: none. Intuitive, especially for those who know what their doing. The plugins are another story. Not so great documented I managed to scratch the surface enough for my current needs. Maybe I did more then scratch the surface but I'm acting modest here ;) Ido think the DB design could have been a lot better.

And I have their if: endif; kind of PHP coding. This is something to laugh at for a C++ coder. Any (if/for/while ...) that is going to a new line needs a {}. This allows you to better follow the code and ... it's the C++ way, the way of our forefathers!

So ... What Do You Need To Do With A New Blog?

1. First thing first Change Your Theme To Fit Your Needs. Change the actual PHP code to fit your needs as it's quite easy. Then some basic SEO features like noindex on listing pages.
2. You need Advertising features. This is what I focused on in terms of wordpress plugins and wrote a bunch of them to do what I need. I will share one tomorrow here.
3. It also fits in advertising but you need Cookie Stuffing features. A plugin of mine does that too.
4. A better Upload Manager. I don't like the bundled one. I really don't like it!
5. A Statistics plugin to see your new blog's traffic informations.
6. A Sitemap plugin to generate your XML sitemap.
7. SMTP Settings customizer. I want to tell Wordpress how to send my emails.

These are just a few of the things I already finished but it's enough to talk about for now.

Why Would You Change Your Theme?

Let's say you see that the theme writer forgot to add a div to clear both and allow you to float elements in a post excerpt and not break the whole thing. Well, I had to fix that. I fixed a few stuff about listing comments. I ditched the footprints and that's all I did. I'm working on a theme unlike any I've seen so far but it's not ready yet.

Advertising?

I don't like the concept of blog-level advertising. Things have to be oriented to the page / category visited. Simple! I needed post(s) level, category(ies) level advertising so I had to write some plugins to help me with this. One of them will be released here tomorrow. It's so simple but it's great! It may already exist but it's easier for me to write it then to search ;) and then fix and then pimp / tune. Plugin tuning is not cool when you deal with 'unclean' coders.

Cookie Stuffing?

Don't tell me you don't do it. I wrote a plugin that does it professionally. I do a bunch of my affiliate sales with cookie stuffing and review sites. I'll teach you about this.

You know most people who read reviews will read your review, but never click your affiliate link? They just hit back to the product page or use Alt+Tab to switch back to it. You convinced them to buy. It should be your sale.

Upload Manager?

I wrote a stupid file manager to allow me to upload files to the uploads folder easily, rename and remove them. What else do you need? Image resizing! What the fk for?

Statistics?

Unless you use Google Analitics and you are willing to give them all your traffic info (=insanity) then you need a plugin to track things down for you. I'm using a publicly available one right now, won't mention it, but I'm also writing my own.

Sitemap?

Allegedly improves indexing but surely makes life easier for scrapers.  Real indexing is called old school crawling.

SMTP Settings?

If you don't know what these are you are lucky :) But if you do you know you can't rely on the local mail send feature Wordpress uses by default. You need to specify the SMTP server, auth informations and the account to use. I like it like this so I had to write a pluging to kindly ask Wordpress to do shit my way or the highway.

What About You?

I haven't said anything here about content generation and such ... yet. But there's time. There are also other things I did but this is just for starters. I'll cover a lot more in the future posts. My question to you is:

What were your impressions / needs at your first encounter with Wordpress?