I launched the new WordPress-driven spoomusic.com website this month, which was a fun and rewarding experience. The old site was written without a database, using the filesystem for nearly everything. As crazy as it sounds, I think this was exactly the right thing to do at the time because the content was primarily MP3s and images. In addition, since the design was about as simple as it could possibly be, it was rather straightforward to bulk import all of the content (news, interviews, album text, etc.) using WordPress’s XML-RPC interface. (And I did it in OCaml using my library, xmlrpc-light, so I even had fun doing it!)

There are many advantages to using WordPress that I already enjoy: all albums and other content can get comments, which is a feature I wanted for a long time but never had the energy to write from scratch; albums can now be “drafts”, which is so awesome, since we never get albums right the first time, and it’s nice that the public doesn’t have to endure our accidents; artists can edit their own album content; artists each get their own blog… I could go on…

By the way, I’m writing this using the latest SVN trunk of WordPress, which has a totally redesigned administration interface. It looks like it’s still a work in progress, and I’m not sure what I think of it yet. It sure is different. Try it out sometime.