WikiMedia or WordPress?

I still haven’t had time to work on the development of a new interface for The Pet Wiki. I’ve been busy with so many other things, and needing to share a computer really hasn’t help. I won’t be doing much this week, but I finish this semester at school on Friday, so my time will free up and I’ll really be able to make things happen.

It’s OK that we haven’t made a lot of progress yet. In some ways it’s even good. I’m starting to wonder if the MediaWiki was the correct platform to use. WordPress may be more accessible for people to use, and there are a ton of plug-ins that can be added to enhance the system. The major advantage that WordPress has over the MediaWiki is the text editor. You don’t need to know WikiText. It’s not that WikiText so hard to use, but for people that aren’t familiar with it, it can be a bit scary. I know that my mom is afraid of it. She writes a ton, but I often go back to bold things for her and things like that.

We tried to add a text editor extention a while back (WYSIWYG editor has been added,) but it took too long to load. It effected the speed of the whole site, so we took it down. Maybe something else has been created in the meantime. More research is necessary.

If we do decide to move The Pet Wiki over to WordPress, we’ll need to be very careful not to lose any of the SEO that we’ve gotten. My leaning would be to try to stay with the same URLs, but if not, we’ll need to be careful to redirect from the old pages to the new ones. We’ve got a lot to think about.