I’m starting to get tired of the system that runs behind the scenes here on alexking.org. I’ve found that I update my blog more than I update the rest of the site in part because it’s a habit and in part because it’s just easier.

I built the basic template system used for the rest of the site over two years ago and I certainly wouldn’t do it the same today as I did then. There are a number of things I don’t like, crufty URLs, no comprehensive search, more manual updating than I’d like, etc.

The solution that I’ve been thinking about for a while is to use WordPress to run the entire site. This would make a lot of really cool things possible:

1. True site-wide search capability and other cool stuff you can do when everything is in a database.
2. Ability for people to leave comments/trackbacks on every page.
3. A comprehensive what’s new/changed list for the site.
4. RSS/Atom feeds for everything.
5. Auto-generate the menu and landing pages at each level

There would be a few places that I’d still want to run stand-alone PHP scripts (like my fantasy baseball draft page for example) or execute utility code, but I think I could build in some functionality to include generated content using the custom fields in WP to point to my little scriptlets. Using something like the Staticize plugin, the database overhead wouldn’t really come into play.

I know this is what Mambo and Drupal are built for, but I’m playing with Mambo right now and I’m not entirely sold on it. I still want to take a closer look at Drupal. Any CMS would probably give me most of what I want.

Of course, I’ve got some stuff I need to get wrapped up before I get to do something like this; it’s good to let stuff like this simmer for a while anyway.