Built a new blog on WordPress

Last week, I launched a new blog I’ve been building over the past month — a foodie blog, The Taste Place.

The Taste Place is a multi-author blog. So far, my boyfriend Jeff and I are the only authors, but we do have plans to rope in some more friends and family. After all, our friends and family are the reason I built it (with a ton of fabulous ideas, feedback, and enthusiasm from Jeff).

Those of you who follow either of us on Facebook know that Jeff and I are both big time foodies, and that we also enjoy a good cocktail or two. We absolutely love to cook, especially together, and take great joy in trying out new recipes and techniques. Our kitchen duty time is excellent together time. I also come from a family of foodies, and we both have a ton of foodie friends. We constantly find ourselves emailing recipes back and forth, or posting photos of our culinary masterpieces. So, we decided to launch a group blog, where our friends and family can all participate.

If you read my blog and/or my Tweets, you also know that I’m a big Drupal advocate (even if you don’t know what Drupal is). Drupal is my platform of choice when developing most websites, particularly websites that require a lot of scalable customized features and modules.

But, for building just a “simple” blog, Drupal is a bit of an overkill. So, I opted to go with WordPress (version 2.7) for The Taste Place blog.

It’s been a couple years since I really developed with WordPress. But then it’s also been a couple of years since I’ve built a site that’s just a blog. Although this very website is “just a blog”, I built it in Drupal because it also serves as a sandbox for me to test and showcase Drupal modules that I’m trying out for other websites. So this site is an exception. When it came to the food blog, I wanted something simpler and quicker, which brought me back to WordPress.

I am very impressed with WordPress 2.7, and will definitely blog a detailed review later.

But, for now, I’ll start with blogging a series about some of the tips and tricks I used to design and develop The Taste Place. Never one to reinvent the wheel, I took an existing theme, the clean and beautiful Amazing Grace theme, and tweaked it to meet my needs. I did most of this through plugins and widgets, but also used some customized coding. And I’m not done yet… I have more enhancements to contribute to The Taste Place over the next month or two.

So, Drupal is still my content management of choice for websites that require more than a blog and a few static pages. But, WordPress is once again my blogging platform of choice.