So I’ve been trying out WordPress, but having lots of problems. Here are the two most recent:

• Not being able to insert the text “convert (from” — even with other characters in the middle — without getting a 403 error.  Not being able to insert images without getting a 403 error.  I had to create a .htaccess file in my wp-admin directory.  Support thread here.
• Not being able to insert special characters without them being converted into question marks on pressing Save.  I had to convert the mySQL database to UTF-8, which was created as Latin encoding by default.  This screwed up all my posts, but I made backups first.  Support thread here.

This really isn’t working out the way I expected it to.  Spending much more time maintaining WordPress itself than I would have spent maintaining a bunch of hand-written web pages.