Welcome back, readers! After a year long hiatus, the TRI is now back online and bringing many positive changes concerning the way we are working.
But we’ll go into that in our main site later and explain here why we merged the Make Money Online Knowledge Base, made in MediaWiki into PANTORIALS, a WordPress site.
From the get-go, the obvious change is in the Content Management System (CMS). You see, MediaWiki is very easy to install and with a few extensions – the equivalent to WordPress plugins – creating new articles, pages and portals is not very difficult. Populating it has less requirements going for it but it depends whether you already have some content ready or not, like any other site.
In contrast, a CMS like WP, offers a great deal of customization options, theme’s selection, post types, media solutions, plugins, updates… And it’s not hard at all to figure out where this is going.
The fact is, the more we stuff on a website, the more breaking points we are putting in it. At the TRI this happened to us when we tried to update our core theme, Divi. It was not possible to edit existing posts because the page builder entered in an infinite loop. And sure enough, updating the theme solved the issue while creating another one: now it conflicts with Yoast’s SEO plugin.
MediaWiki doesn’t have this sort of problems, especially if you get extensions with this note:
WordPress does have a similar “self-curation”, through the reviews on the plugin repository.
So why have you changed the MMOKB from MediaWiki to WordPress?
The turning tide against MW’s favour is just that. What makes it so useful is what makes it less attractive; the “easy” found on MediaWiki is due to the removal of pretty much anything that isn’t meant for writing. Without extensions, basic stuff like editing text relies on the MediaWiki Manual, which isn’t user friendly for a non-coder. You have to have some HTML skills because a simple CTRL+C – CTRL+V from the Manual or Wikiedia won’t be able to cut it. You have to adapt the code to fit your own content. This is especially annoying if your site has to be updated frequently.
…which sucks. For everything else, you have to use HTML, which isn’t hard to learn but will definitely cost you time you should spend writing.
Depending on your theme (WP) or skin (MW), you might have more options available, but ultimately, WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor beats it by miles, not only for being native on the installation but for also having plenty of functions people commonly use when composing a blog post.
With WordPress, it’s also easier to standardize your posts (make them have the same layout), than it is on MediaWiki.
Of course, each of them have their usefulness in the field they are applied to. But for us, we have decided that it doesn’t.
With that said, at the TRI, we realized that we were taking an overly commercial approach to you guys and gals, which isn’t very professional and we decided to revamp things around since the aim now is not just to teach people how to make money online. After reviewing MMOKB, we concluded the site isn’t helpful enough, for those editing it and for those reading it and now, it will be absorbed into here.
We will strive to make this a tutorial repository for webmasters where you can simply come by and get quick and practical assistance. This will be explained in detail on the next post. Hope to see you there!
