Annual Post Where I Question the Tools I Use
October 11th, 2006I’ve been struggling with the future of personal publishing. It’s not an existential turmoil, just a technological questioning. There’s never been better or more tools to publish online as an individual. For just about whatever one wants to put online, a tool exists to get it there. It’s a great time to be a-publishin’.
Heather and I are continually having long talks about dooce and the tech behind it. I’ve held off moving away from the tool we use there, as the site is mostly working just fine.
The struggle for me is that as the landscape changes and new concepts and widgets emerge, I’m always asking myself if the tool(s) I’ve chosen can grow with me. Blurbomat is published using Movable Type 3.2. There is a newer version, but I can’t be bothered to install it. I’ve got a private blog in WordPress, skinned to look like the public one generated by Movable Type. WordPress has come a long way in the past couple of years, but it doesn’t quite work the way I’d like for a site like dooce.
So I wasn’t really surprised to read Matt Haughey’s account of the switch on his personal blog away from Movable Type to WordPress. In 2005 I recommended to a friend to check out Movable Type and I hadn’t looked at the default templates until they asked me to help. After wading through all the divs (not a dis, just saying) I decided that it was pretty clear why so many people were moving to WordPress: sweet migration scripts, easily theme-able and free. When GEORGE! migrated away from Blogger/Blogspot to his own hosted space, we had him up and running on WordPress in a matter of minutes. He downloaded a couple of plug-ins and had all his Blogger entries live in about 10 minutes. Pretty sweet. It didn’t hurt that WordPress was a few-click install at his host.
However, what happens when you have thousands of entries? Hundreds of thousands of comments? Can these off the shelf systems handle it? And what about Drupal? Or building your own in the Django framework? Or Radiant?
If you aren’t using Movable Type, WordPress or Textpattern, what do you use for industrial-strength content management (that doesn’t cost over four figures)? o
I still use Movable Type for my blog, but have used Drupal for several larger content sites for work, and it’s good. It’s different, and it takes some getting used to, but it’s very flexible, themeable and has lots of interesting available plugins. For Dooce? Probably not. You might want to check out Expression Engine (http://pmachine.com). Several of my designer friedns use it and are quite happy with it, and can change/theme it without having to write a whole lot (if any) code.
CommunityServer:
http://communityserver.org
I don’t have a lot of traffic, but this software does run some very high traffic Microsoft sites (blogs.msdn.com, weblogs.asp.net).
I’m not sure if you’d be comfortable with it, though. It’s designed for Microsoft server side technologies (ASP.NET/SQL Server), and since it looks like you’re currently on Linux, I’m guessing you’d probably rather stick with what you know. Also, I haven’t ever tried to create my own theme, so I can’t speak to how easy or difficult that might be.
But, from a technological standpoint, I know it was designed and architected to handle very high-traffic sites.
If you’d like, I can create a test blog for you to play around with. Just contact me using the email link on my blog.
I’m a huge supporter of Symphony (http://symphony21.com) for content management. It’s a relatively new tool, but is extremely powerful and robust (makes use of XML and XSLT for templating – very easy to pick up). It was once priced at $49, but is now free with an optional support plan. It’s also got a quickly growing community behind it over at http://overture21.com.
I’ve decided to use it for 3 client projects and so far it’s been an absolute joy to work with. I used Wordpress for the majority of my previous projects and just beat it into shape with some PHP hacking, but Symphony allows me to completely customize the layout of the site and data right from within the admin interface.
Just to be clear, I think wordpress is a lot of fun for a personal site, but I wouldn’t use it on client sites or for anything corporate. It did handle my 3,000 entries and 1,500 comments alright and still seems to be fast given my meager traffic.
In terms of industrial strength CMSes, I think django is a good way to go or just build it yourself, on top of existing open source stuff. I’d rather pay someone four figures than ever dream of handing that much over to a company for their product.
Thanks, Matt. I hear you on the custom development.
And other folks, I’m not in need of a blogging tool, I’m in need of a content management tool that might include blogs.
Well.
I use Django. And not just because it’s my day job
Django came along right at a point in my career where I was reaching the limits of what I could reasonably do with off-the-shelf CMS products, even the open-source ones, and that alone was enough to win me over (the fact that I was a closet Python geek helped a bit, too). Everything else was just icing on the cake, and boy was there ever a lot of icing.
Over time, that initial impression has been reinforced again and again. I’ve been neglecting my blog in favor of various other personal and work projects, but I keep coming back to the one big change Django made for me: I can start each project from a clean slate of “what do I need it to do?” instead of “how much of this can I hack into CMS X?”.
If you’ve got any questions about Django, anything at all (basics, tips, tricks, scaling to Skynet proportions), feel free to email me. May turn out it’s not a good choice for you, may turn out it is. But if you want to investigate and figure that out, I’ll be happy to help.
I am a Movable Type user, I switched over from Blogger last year. I’ve seen a lot of people switch from MT to WordPress in recent months. Frankly, I haven’t investigated it much because I don’t even want to be tempted to switch, because I’ve put a lot of time and effort into making MT into what I want it to be. It does all I need it to do.
My only gripe is that I wish upgrades were easier. They’re not PAINFUL, but it could be easier.
How ’bout Joomla? nÈ mambo.
http://www.joomla.org
Easy to install, pretty powerful, lots of plugins, active community, decent looking both in style and the actual html.
I highly, highly recommend Django, and it’s not even my day job! I’m building my own blog/site with it at the moment. It’s scalable and cacheable. It’s so simple to do a ton of stuff, yet every time I turn around I find more awesome functionality. Try going through the tutorial. You won’t be disappointed.
I’m a very happy WordPress and Drupal user myself. WordPress is great for simple blogs, and Drupal is ridiculously powerful and scalable.
Both seem extremely stable, and there’s great community and commercial support for Drupal.
My only experience with a CommunityServer site (as someone mentioned above) is almost laughably bad. It was buggy, didn’t support non-IE browsers well, and frankly looked like most other ASP.NET sites I see. I love .NET, but there’s just something about ASP.NET sites that make them all look similar to me.
Also, a Microsoft stack is expensive because of MS SQL Server, and it just takes higher end hardware to run.
Your results may vary of course.
For my personal site I use Wordpress, for commercial sites I use Mambo CMS…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mambo_(CMS)
ExpressionEngine was the first CMS I ever encountered. It has its quirks (I feel very removed from the data, which can be a good thing), but it works well and you can customize the crap put of it. No clue as to how it scales or deals with a zillion comments or a tremendous load.
I’ve heard good things about PHP-Nuke and Joomla, but have played with them yet.
I’ve used Roller in the past. Java-based and free, it’s used by Sun and IBM for their corporate blogs. Sun actually employs the lead developer, the Roller project got him this job. I used to be a committer.
Hi Jon,
for a CMS I would recommend Daisy http://www.daisycms.org. I know these guys personally, and they do a great job. Problem might be that it is Java, and you need shell access to the server. Using ‘extensions’ it is possible to extend the functionality of the CMS for every purpose you need, including blogging.
I ain’t no damn expert, but I like wordpress. It’s default theme was easy for me to adjust to my own style…that whole less is more idea. It was free. It truly was just a few cliks to move to my host (which I am also really satisfied with: simple and cheap).
as far as personal / smalled CMS solutions go (as opposed to say, Vignette et al) i can’t really weigh in with first-hand experience (my blog is still semtimentally — and somewhat stubbornly — handcoded).
but another for the list that i know of, is a package called CityDesk, made by Fog Creek (see http://www.fogcreek.com/) — behind-the-scenes it’s Joel (from Joel on Software) and a bunch of NYC-based developers.
i haven’t used it, but i do remember hearing good things at random parties in Brooklyn, even a few years ago…
argh. sorry. that should read “personal / small CMS solutions” and “sentimentally”.
coffee. now.
Another vote for django. Easy to use, scales well, active development community. Plus python is just cool
I am a Textpattern fan myself although I am always interested in alternatives that may prove better. My big thing is I hand code all my XHTML Strict, custom PHP if needed (Although I suck at PHP) and CSS. Textpattern lets me do this without adhering to some pre designed template structure and that freedom to me is very important.
Not to mention that Textpatterns forms have limitless possibilities and the tag system is excellent as are the large amount of great plugins/add-ons. Has MT been good to you and how do you find managing it?
Movable Type has been great. As Matt said earlier, I’d have a hard time using anything else for a professional project, save Textpattern. It’s not that anything else sucks, it’s just what I know.
In terms of blogging, one of the biggest problems facing site owners was comment spam. Six Apart fixed that one in a big way with Typekey. I know it’s a barrier for site visitors, but sometimes barriers are a good thing.
I moved from MT to WordPress a couple of years ago when they started charging for it. MT definitely has some nice features (such as multiple blogs with one installation), and I don’t know what your hosting situation is like. I’ve often wondered why you guys stick with MT, and I always figured it was because you shared a single installation. If that’s not the case, or if you don’t mind having two independent installations then I think migrating is well worth it.
The best feature of WordPress, IMO, is the Akismet anti-spam plug in. Maybe I’m a rare case, but I’ve never had a false positive or a false negative with Akismet, and it’s blocked thousands of spam comments at my site.
I’ve also considered switching to Typo because the Ajax is slick, and Rails is sexy. But I’m not sure if that’s really a compelling reason to use it.
In the case of dooce, the server situation (serving static vs. dynamic pages) was a concern, but now not so much. Still, since turning on Typekey, haven’t had to even think about comment spam. That is not true for my private WordPress site with Askimet turned on. I still have to touch the spam. Sure, it will auto-delete, but I get nagged with notifications that I shouldn’t get nagged with.
In Heather’s case, that would be thousands of nags. Not good. Movable Type with Typekey is a great solution for comment spam. The multiple blogs feature is sweet as well. There are sexy options out there, but at this point, I’m not sure it’s worth it, unless there is a compelling way a new solution handles content.
I like the Section/Category thing that Textpattern has going on, but it’s too rigid. Sure, plug-ins extend something but what happens when the plug-in developer stops supporting the plug-in? Or the product upgrade breaks the plug-in? You’re screwed. And that’s my issue. I don’t want to be screwed. Except by my lady.
I think you may actually be at the point where you’ve outgrown all the pre-made tools out there and need to start developing your own. It’s not that hard if you learn PHP (the learning curve is pretty steep at first but it comes quickly).
It’s hard to fit a premade CMS with what a client wants because every client wants something different. Personally, I struggle with this constantly because nothing I’ve ever downloaded has done what I’ve wanted it to do; and, in the end I end up building my own in PHP.
Hey John,
I would definitely consider building your own system. My site gets a tiny fraction of the traffic that your sites do, but it is only a couple hundred lines of PHP with a mysql db which makes it extremely fast.
Plus it’s wicked fun to write your own code and have complete confidence that you understand the problems when they happen. Once you start to write your own stuff all the packages like wordpress and textpattern just seem incredibly overcomplicated.
Plus you can do WHATEVER you want. It’s very empowering.
I use Drupal. I wouldn’t call my needs “industrial-strength,” although I do consider my geek-genius husband rather choosy when it comes to tech tools.
We only considered free solutions. He settled on Drupal because it’s so customizable. There’s a large selection of plug-ins (thanks to the active Drupal community) and the few things I’ve wanted that haven’t been available he’s just written himself. That’s another reason we chose Drupal over some of the other solutions out there – complete access to and control over the code. It’s also easy to setup and use. Cost, customization, control: it was the obvious choice for our needs.