Blogging Origins
I’m an old-school blogger and website developer/designer. Originally, I had a blog called ‘Lunarlog’ (off of my main website Lunarstudio which started off on a very good note and gained a fair amount of popularity. That blog had been created in a time when most people never even heard of the term ‘blog.’ I had used an early system that I installed and hooked in called Movabletype (famous for bloggers blogging on Typepad.) Over a short amount of time, Lunarlog fell into a very sad state of disrepair.
Comment spam by automated bots became common in those early days - and the problem only seemed to get worse. I began to spend more time deleting those fake messages then I had time to write new posts, answer readers, and get on with my other daily routines.
The authors of Movabletype were just beginning to take measures to counter this spam but it involved upgrading the software. As this software installation wasn’t automated, it was not an easy task by any means having to have hooked this into databases. I upgraded a few times (mostly to prevent spam) and each time the website broke - then I had to spend weeks some times repairing what had broken.
Eventually, the Movabletype authors implemented a licensing policy in 2004 - the software was no longer available for free under certain terms. A lot of discenchanted MT veterans moved over to different engines such as Wordpress and Expression Engine. The MT software development began to experience growing pains.
So I stopped - I had enough of keeping up with the blogging world, spammers, and updates. It was a shame because Lunarlog was a funny site. It was an all-around laugh other than the few times I got pissed at somebody (but even then, I think those moments were a laugh.) And for all the faults Movabletype had at the time, I had no real complaints as it was free software that we were using.
Enter 2008 and Movabletype
I have the rest of the things in my life in order (I hope) at the moment. I have some free time to kill and wanted to figure out what the blogging and content management system world has been up to. A lot has changed since I last contributed to my old blog website. Spam has largely been put under a lot of control - new systems have been implemented to keep spammers out although I’m sure a few get through from time to time. I also wanted to see what type of blogging software ran smoothly as well as what potential possibilities it had for other sites I will upgrade or develop (such as my main website gallery of Lunarstudio.)
Due to all the problems I had with Movabletype, I wanted to stay clear away from that system. This is not to say that the MT folks have since improved their software or changed their licensing schemes as I am sure they have - but I was bitten pretty hard, and I didn’t want to risk working with it all over again.
In reviewing which software I should start off again with, I had written a few people at various popular technology blogs/websites that serve extremely high traffic. One popular website wrote back (and I will keep them anonymous) said that they were using Movabletype and in their own words, that everyone there “hates it. Go with Wordpress.” That was the last nail in the coffin for me.
2008 and the Joomla Review
The other software of interest which came up was Joomla - a full-blown open-source CMS (Content Management System.) I checked this out a little over a week ago to see if it could do what I wanted it to do. It can do plenty, however it’s overly-complicated, a royal pain to use, and the templates from the community seemed very rigid and unfriendly to the average user and especially designer.
For someone that’s trying to simplify the authoring process, I found that Joomla only serves to make life more complicated. I set it up and gave it a good run for a few days - the entire time I was scratching my head in wonderment. While it provides some very innovative and nifty features, this software is NOT for the beginner or casual author - or even 98% of the web-designing population.
The fanboys who support Joomla will fight you tooth and nail that their software ‘is the best’, but to be honest these programmers can’t see two feet in front of them. Don’t even listen to these guys. My main reasoning that Joomla is terrible to work with is because it’s based upon open-source. It’s all-over the place.
I think the big mistake with people is that they assume open-source automatically entails ‘better.’ Open source is fine if the system was laid-out cohesively from the start with a structure in place. However, I do not get this impression with Joomla. I’m under the impression that it was a decent package in the beginning and it has since bit off more than it could chew. The die-hard developers and designers that run their lives based upon this software don’t want to see it fail so they only perpetuate this monster through their fanboy ravings.
When it comes to open source, certain projects succeed tremendously (I actually can’t recall any open source projects that have failed) - but most still remain largely unknown to the general tech community. If you look at the successful community-based projects, they eventually fell under certain packages. Red Hat and even (dare I say) the more recent Apple OS’s are examples of an open-source based project/groundings that got turned into something functional through a company.
I really shouldn’t go off on a rant about Joomla here. As I said before, it does a heck of a lot and probably more than you could ever ask for. The volunteer community there seems great and they are all willing to help you out at the drop of a dime. However, it does get way out of control with themes and modules (plugins or extensions in other developer-speak.) They all seem to want to charge you ultimately for their work.
I got around to asking a friend who is fairly famous artist who does digital cover work for many magazines. I asked him what he was using for his artwork gallery website and mentioned Joomla. He couldn’t say anything nice about it. What he told me was “you have to hire a programmer any time you want to change something. I wish I had discovered Wordpress sooner.”
To this end, I think Joomla currently fails. I have high hopes for them and I do support what they are trying to accomplish - but I sincerely believe that for the masses to adopt their program, they need to take a deep breath and consolidate.
Simplify, simplify, and simplify…
2008 and the Wordpress Review
What more can I say? Perhaps a lot. Wordpress has been around for a very long time in the blogging world. I think it’s newer than Movabletype, but in that regards it simpler and it fixed a lot which was wrong with MT. It also boasts a tremendous fan-base and community. If there’s something you need to do, then chances are someone has already written a plugin or widget for it - and unlike Joomla developers, it’s almost all free (sometimes they ask for donations which are very well deserved.)
I installed Wordpress through Cpanel’s Fantastico and was up and running within a minute. Everything is just laid out simply. There’s really not much guesswork. From an author’s standpoint, all you really have to do is make a category, write an article, and simply publish.
Of course, the average person wants to customize the look, feel, and functionality of their WP installation over their default ‘Kubrick’ theme. If you do a Google search for ‘Wordpress Themes’, the results abound. There’s plenty of free themes available for download throughout the Internet. And if you want to proceed further, an average person can take a free theme and customize it to their liking simply by modifying some basic elements to the style sheets (CSS or Cascading Style Sheets.) As for adding functionality, it is as simple as going on the Wordpress.org website and clicking on ‘Extend.’ There’s thousands of plugins that will add functionality within a second to your new installation.
As for setting up my Wordpress install, I felt like I was back in somewhat familiar territory. The dashboard (or control panel) is very simple. Things for the most part are fairly straight-forward and uncomplicated. There’s definitely a few things that you’ll want to read up on if it’s your first time, but this learning curve pales in comparison to other packages. Plus, the wealth of infomation on the Internet regarding Wordpress is overwhelming. But don’t be fooled by Wordpresses simplicity - there’s a muscle car under that hood.
My only real criticism of Wordpress is that there’s a few things that they should do to clean-up or improve regarding the interface. There’s a few features that should be included with a fresh install which seem common-sense (such as a ’subscribe to post’ function) that is easily remedied by searching through extensions that others have written for free. My other criticism of Wordpress is not so much a criticism related to their development, but I found some of their forum setup lacking in responses. During the past week of tinkering, I wrote about eight questions on their forum, and only about one of them were responded to by the community. The one response was very helpful, but the other ones have had hardly any replies whatsoever. I’m afraid that those questions will remain in an indefinite loop of no-response.
However, if you’re willing to live with this, you will find pretty much all the answers you need from simply searching through Google and writing other others directly.
Overall Recommendations
I can’t really say anything bad about Wordpress. There may be some other systems out there but I’m fairly content with this blogging system and am not looking to change any time soon. Setup was fairly painless (however, I usually go the extra mile with these things.) As for straight-up blogging software or even a decent website for an average company, Wordpress has a lot of potential under the right hands.
If that’s all you’re looking for is a simple way to display gallery images, photos, or artwork - I would recommend something I didn’t go into detail about but that I have installed this past summer - and that is Gallery 2. The also happen to have a Gallery 2 plugin for Wordpress which you can hook together fairly easily.
Anyways, happy blogging. Write me if you have any criticisms, questions, or suggestions.
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