I’ve been running WordPress for years now and find it to be a solid solution for what I want to do. The only negative in my view is the requirement to use mySQL. There’s nothing wrong with mySQL itself, it more than does the job. I can quibble that it is one more thing to patch and manage, but it’s not something that takes a lot of time. I’m hosting it on Azure right now (so I can get some practical experience, if on a small scale) and there the options are to run a VM so you can host mySQL (which makes sense if you have many blogs) or use the ClearDB solution which costs $10 a month if you have more than 1GB (and that’s per database). I have another small project running in SQL Azure and while I frequently grump about the limitations compared to the ‘real’ version, it works well enough for simple stuff, as clearly my blog is.

Which brings us to Project Nami (Not Another MySQL Interpreter). I ran across this recently and decided to do a test of it. They recommend watching the install video first and they really got it right, it’s a five minute install and then you’re in WordPress and running. It deploys direct from GitHub, very very nice. Good enough for ‘production’ use? From what I’ve seen it is. The very worst case is the project dies, you export the data, do a clean install back on mySQL, and import the data (WordPress makes this just about painless). The next worst is that some plug-in you want to use fails to install/run, leaving you the option of going back to mySQL or finding another plug-in. It’s a reasonable solution right now, and more than that, it’s a “project” you can do in Azure for next to nothing. Even if you set it up, test it, and tear it down, it’s worth an hour or so just for that.

I’m going to set up another one, try some more plug-ins, then decide if I want to move this blog over.