big teddy
  • Mar
    05
    Of Blogs and Men.
    by mike at 3:11pm

    So you’re thinking of creating a web log?

    So I’ve been meaning to create a new more usable weblog/site and this is what I’ve ended up with. This process has taken way too long and various fits and starts. My old site was running off of php web application I wrote a couple of years ago when the main solution for weblogs software was moveabletype which at the time was perl and used a flat file db. Because of this I ended up writing a PHP based weblog package that I was actually fairly proud of, but never really got the time to finish it off. So this time around I decided to start looking at more solutions.

    What I really wanted was something half weblog and half Content Management System and they had to be PHP/MySQL based. I ended looking at 3 main packages, all good in particular areas.

    1. WordPress (the winner!)
    2. Drupal
    3. Mambo CMS

    So why Wordpress? Wordpress was one of the first I looked at and as weblogging software it looked pretty good. The downside was I wanted a couple of content areas that were not part of the blog which was something I didn’t think that Wordpress had at first. (It does though). The second thing about Wordpress that was most impressive was the ease with which it installed. Getting it running with a custom theme only took a matter of hours, though it should be noted I know my way around PHP etc. Even so there’s a variety of free themes available and tweaking the theme is available right through the control panel. Not only was my theme easy to get running but I was able to really get the granularity I needed to get my page to look exactly the way I wanted. As the simplest of the systems I looked at, it also had the easiest administration screens to deal with. (Though those big ass input fields can be annoying).

    Drupal ran a close second. Again very easy to install and get running, and was fairly easy to get running with a custom theme. However there were many small details that I had problems getting working like the breadcrumbs etc. It was also a bit harder to deal with in terms of customizing. Drupal makes a valiant attempt to make it easy to customize by utilizing a couple of different templating systems, however as with virtually all software as you add features you add complexity and this is the case here.

    Mambo was actually the first CMS I installed and while it may be something to look at for a large multi-user CMS it was overkill for what I was trying to do. Templating was actually maybe a bit easier than drupal, however it’s admin screens were not intuitive at all (what the heck is the difference between a section and a category?).

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