It has been a while since I looked at blogging software. I have been very satisfied with Nucleus CMS for the last year. One of the projects that I will be involved in the near future will envolve a blog-like content management system, so I decided to see what has changed in this area.
As many of your know, I am a strong supporter of Open Source Software. Open Source Software does not provide any solutions for certain types of problems, but content management needs are covered magically well. In fact, there are so many different open source content management systems, that there was a need for a special site that reviews, rates, and demonstrates all of them. This site exists and is indeed very helpful – opensourceCMS.com. If you need just a quick overview of what is available, consider CMS Ratings page.
Looking through the list of CMS – Blogs software, I get the selection of Nucleus CMS, Textpattern, pLog, Serendipity, b2evolution, bBlog, WordPress, BLOG:CMS, Simplog, and PHP-Update. This is a really good selection of tools. Now, which one do I want?
I am more than familiar with Nucleus CMS. It is very flexible, easy to use, and has a good deal of enhancements in the contrib area. I am missing a better WYSIWYG post editor, sub-categories for posts and multipaged posts. A better job could have been done with private and restricted posts. So far, there is no way to do it clearly. One can use drafts or post into different blogs. Still, this is a very good piece of software and can satisfy almost anyone’s needs.
BLOG:CMS is something I have used at some point too. This is basically the same thing as Nucleus CMS, but with a number of themes and plugins packaged and preconfigured to work smoothly. I have stopped using it because of the upgrade procedure, which is alsmost as violent as backup-remove-install-restore cycle. Not much fun when we you have few thousands of posts and a number of handmade customizations.
pLog is something I haven’t touched myself, but heard a few opinions. Alexander Mamchenkov and Vladimir Ivaschenko are both using pLog for their blogs. Both of them confirmed that pLog is a very low-functionality solution which requires a lot of work if you want to do anything advanced with your blog. And I do want to do something advanced with my blog.
Rest of the systems are totally new to me. So I decided to check them out. Thankfully, there is a demo installation for each one at opensourceCMS.com. I went through all of them, but only two really impressed me. These were b2evolution and WordPress.
With a quick overview that I gave both of these, they are very much alike. Both do provide things that I miss in Nucleus CMS (sub-categories, multipage posts, and better post editor). Both also have a tonne of other functionality that I didn’t have enough time looking through. So, if you are looking for a good blogging CMS, try either b2evolution or WordPress. These should provide any functionality you might be dreaming off.
Now that I have found something better I am thinking about migrating from Nucleus CMS, but the amount of work scares me though…