My comments on the Why use Wordpress thread [webmasterworld.com ] were drifting away from Wordpress per se. I looked for an appropriate place to start a more general discussion, and found that there was no sub-forum in "Code, Content, and Presentation" that fits, which says something.

I want to encourage people to try new things. I will admit that I rather tend to over do it, and waste time trying too much new stuff. A few examples.

My first example is not purely a webmaster one. Switching from Windows to Linux. Its worked hugely well for me, and especially once I started doing websites - it helped to be running a Unix type OS as that is what the sites are hosted on. Same tools, case sensitivity, same file separators, etc. The only problem is that being able to find and install software more easily interacts rather badly with my tendency to try new stuff for the sake of it. I did over do it by distro hopping (at least annually for ten years) trying to find the perfect distro - I should have just stuck to Mandriva until their releases slowed and then switched.

Now to proper webmaster stuff. My site started as a section of a Wordpress site that did not work out, so I kept it on Wordpress when I split the site. Its been through a few versions (for good reasons each time!), but the current solution is what I wish I started with: Django so I have a database structure that fits the structure of my content, that is not too difficult to change, and without anything like as much work as writing a custom CMS from scratch. I would have saved myself a lot of work if I had discovered it a few years earlier.

Using Django meant learning Python. Why do we not have a Python forum here? Its a great language, and it is used by a lot of web sites. It has a LOT of frameworks, libraries and tools. Most of all, its very clean and readable.

For simple sites I use WolfCMS. It cannot do anything Wordpress cannot, but its has a better UI for hierarchically (as opposed to chronologically) ordered sites, and makes doing simple sites simple, and is easy to learn.

Apache is a great server, but in a memory constrained environment, or for high volumes of static files, an event driven sever like Lighttpd, nginx or Cherokee might be better. I currently use a host that allows me to run my own Lighttpd instance (on shared hosting), and its a lot better than mucking around with .htaccess files.

I realise that its necessary to weigh the advantages of learning more tools against the time spent doing it, but its often worth it. There is no best way to do websites, just a choice of tools with different strengths and weaknesses - and if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

OK, rant over, and I think WW has overtaken Twiter as my most productivity sapping time waster.