Blogs?

[MrLinus]

I'm in the long process of finally redesigning my personal website and one of the things I'm considering putting in is a blog. I'm debating creating my own using MySQL/PHP or getting a pre-fab. I was curious if anyone has used/installed a blog and which one they've used and what results they've had with it?

I'm doing some research right now on them but am curious if anyone has had some experience with these.

[gpshewan]

My site goes though too many changes too often. I've used the majority of CMS's and have settled (for present) on using Moveable Type.

I, like you, had toyed with writing my own CMS/Blog framework but I'd probably end up forgetting about it 75% of the way through.

Why MT?

Well it provides a framework and yet it can still easily be incorporated into pretty much any kind of page design. Some systems can be a little too rigid and you have to trawl through too many PHP includes to find out what needs to be incorporated. There is continuing development on plugins to enhance useability or to provide extra features - and you can simply write your own as well. If you have a good knowledge of CSS/PHP then you're laughing. At the moment my site is only blog...but I am tacking on extra pages which fit into the framework as I go along, all seamlessly.

[sumdumguy]

pwaring.. pwaring.. where are you ?

MsM, pwaring has "mucked around" with blogs and was considering writing his own.
I'll bet he has a lot of info that could be helpful.. I'll pm him to make sure he doesn't miss this thread.

[pwaring]

Good grief, don't get me started on blog systems.

It really depends on what you want to do with the blog system and what facilities your host has available. I'm personally not too keen on Movable Type for a number of reasons - partially because of the number of bugs that seem to have arised in it lately and the license is also omewhat restrictive and confusing in parts (e.g. you can give people free web space and let them install MT, but you can't offer free webspace with MT already installed). However, if you want to use Perl/CGI and have no problems with the license potentially being changed without notice then it's an option that a lot of people choose.

I've also tried WordPress (the successor to b2) but it's still got quite a few bugs in it and the stable version doesn't even encrypt your passwords in the database. Obviously that's a bit of a security risk should anyone manage to get hold of your database data - personally I don't think it's worth the risk but it depends on whether you're bothered or not.

If you'd rather power your entire site through one interface then a dedicated Content Management System (CMS) might be worth considering. There's a list of available ones (with demos!) at opensourceCMS, and as you can probably tell, they're mostly licensed under some form of open source. I would personally stay away from PHP-Nuke as I think it's become very bloated and development has gone the wrong way, plus it throws up lots of errors if you enable all warnings in PHP.

I can't claim to have used every single blog/CMS, because there are so many of them nowadays. However, most are clones of each other (e.g. Postnuke is a fork of PHP-Nuke and there doesn't seem to be a huge difference between them) and the others generally niche scripts that are only good if you have a specific use in mind.

As sumdumguy pointed out, I have considered writing my own blog, in fact I'm in the process of trying things out in this direction at the moment. It's no easy task (hence why most people use a pre-fab system) but it does mean that you can integrate your blog with the rest of your site and fix any bugs without waiting for the next release (it's a darn sight easier to fix your own code than that of a popular blog system - I don't have a clue how the internals of WordPress works which makes it very difficult to fix things).

If there's a specific blog system you have in mind, you want one that does a specific task or you want to write your own, just give me a shout.

[MrLinus]

Hrmm. I don't want to use Perl/CGI if I don't have to. My server provides me with a FreeBSD setup and I tacked on PHP/MySQL, which I'm really comfortable with (part of why I'm contemplating writing my own). The OpenSourceCMS looks interesting and I might play with that. You're right in that I could take a pre-fab and modify what I want.

[/edit]

Well I played around today with about 4-5 different pre-fabs and chose Serendipity. Seems to be relatively new and fairly straightforward to modify. I'm a bit rusty on my code and graphic manipulation but I'm getting there (well I have a long way to go yet). Pretty nifty. If ya wanna see visit www.msmittens.com