I have been using WP for a while, mostly in the v2.x series. While I have tested other forms of blogging: blogger.com, vox.com; as well as several packaged setups: Drupal.org, Joomla.org, loudblog.com, and more.
So far the only one other than WordPress that I have gone back to over and over again, has been Drupal. I keep wishing that I could use Drupal for something. It drives me crazy that I have not been able to really get down and use the software. I feel that Drupal is just way to powerful, and complicated just enough to keep me at bay.
Images
WordPress does a great job of meeting my needs for blogging or hosting images (though I would love to have a better back end for image management and displaying). I use it help me post images to forums. I’m able to host the image myself. I don’t have to worry about bandwidth limitations (no one really hits my images enough to worry about).
If you choose to, you can post the thumbnail of the image and link to the large bandwidth image. This would allow people to preview the image and will help easy bandwidth issues. People will see the smaller images and skip over them if they have seen them before.
The one negative side of using WP for images, is there are no copy paste for BB code and other types of formating. This isn’t so much an issue is it would just be convenient to also have the ability to copy and paste the BB code into the forum.
**(I would also suggest making the ability to 'hot link' impossible)
Writing
You really can’t talk about WordPress with out talking about blogging. Let me tell you, 4 years ago WordPress was the easiest to host yourself. Today? WordPress is even easier.
I was never fond of the “visual editor” from any version. I always found myself having issues with it stripping out my code for different things. I always wrote html inside of my post. From div tags to styling. I never really took the time to set it up in the CSS. So I just always typed it in. The “visual editor” messed with this code, so I never use it. I’m not able to make a judgement on the “visual editor” as I just don’t use it.
As far as the other editor goes, I love it. As stated above I am able to do some basic HTML in the editor and make changes to a post where I see fit. I’m sure that with picking a theme I have messed older post up from time to time from all the manual edits.
Themes
I love the default theme for WordPress 3.0. Though I’m sure that are some out there that will just want to use another. If this is the case then you are in luck. There are hundreds for you to look though. You even have the ability to search them.
Plugins
Currently I’m only running 2 plugins. Akismet and WP to Twitter.
In the past I have ran several plugins. I even wrote a plugin myself. Be careful not to install too many or your site will start to slow down.
Summary
WordPress 3.0 is a very nice and polished (from what I can tell) publishing platform. It is a wonderful way for people to create a little place on the Internet and just share their point of view.
If you’re worried about site slowdowns, yet want to install more than a few plugins, you’d benefit greatly from WP Supercache. I don’t use it on my own site (only my family reads it… it’s just a parenthood blog right now) but I’ve used it for professional projects and it works dandy!
thanks for the information Greg. I don’t normally run very many plugins. I try to take the “less is more” approach to things. This doesn’t always happen, but it is an attempt. I’m hoping that this time around I will have just that.