What blog software to use?

[S.B.G]

Popularity isn't always a bad thing. Popularity can also mean a good product. My WordPress security upkeep is very minimal. Once I set up the security plugins, it runs itself.

To each his own and use what works best for you. For me, its WordPress and I couldn't be happier.

 

[jsm4182]

To each his own and use what works best for you. For me, its WordPress and I couldn't be happier.

Thats actually the original point I was trying to make. The OP says he's leaning towards Drupal and the next few posts are just trying to persuade him towards Wordpress and Drupal is bad. Wordpress isn't the be-all and end-all of CMS, you have to find the right choice for the specific site and person building it.

 

[S.B.G]

Sure, he may have been leaning towards Drupal and that's fine, but with the thread title and him asking for suggestions on a blog engine, that invites any and all available options, not just Drupal. Those recommending WordPress are happy with it and wanted to be sure the OP understood their point of view.

 

[Cubytus]

The market for open source CMSs isn't driven by the same things email and ISPs are. Those are consumer orientated. I think if you aim a software suite specifically at geeks, they will cut through the BS and just choose what's best.

I am specifically looking for a CMS that wouldn't be geek-oriented. Not that I wouldn't have the capability of maintaining it, but the goal of my blog would be, mostly, a place where to jolt down notes, short posts and the occasional in-depth article on topics I am interested in. Most of these would be computer-related, but a few may concern politics. I am not at an age anymore where I could spend days just browsing the internet and learning new stuff, hence the requirement of very strong antispam mechanism and protection against other kind of attacks. Computers are a tool, not an end anymore. It's not about wasting money, surely, but time.

Whats with all the drupal hate?

I've been working with Wordpress and Drupal full time for the the last 5 years. Wordpress is great for simple blogs, but once you get into more complex sites Drupal is far better. I've even found Drupal to be great for blogs that don't need as many features as Wordpress has, you can easily create a simple blog without all the extra features getting in the way.

Wordpress is the Windows of Content Management Systems. It has the largest user base, but its interface makes the least sense and it has more security issues.

I haven't read anyone here explicitely hating Drupal or any other CMS, but rather ignoring them.

OVH has an interesting page about its available one-click install CMSs, and WordPress and DotClear as classified as "blog engines", while Drupal, Spip and others are full-fledged CMSs, suitable to build larger sites with a more diverse array of pages. This was the first time I saw anyone stating the difference.

For the time being, I am not trying to build a very complex site but rather, have a much simpler way yet flexible way to organize content split in smaller parts.

Right now, I am testing (if installing and installing a theme can be called testing) TextPattern, my second choice would be Drupal, then WP. Despite it nearing end-of-life, I still consider DotClear as a "reserve" choice as I doubt the biggest hosting provider in the world would leave it as a choice if its future was doubtful.

TextPattern currently has an awful management of themes, with files to be installed by hand through the administration interface, but otherwise very light and clean on the admin side. I haven't found a good theme that would make decent use of widescreens, though.

If I haven't made that, availability of themes able to both display correctly on vertical (mobile) screens and still make clever use of the great width (no wide empty bars left and right) while remaining readable is a major plus.

 

[0dev]

I am specifically looking for a CMS that wouldn't be geek-oriented. Not that I wouldn't have the capability of maintaining it, but the goal of my blog would be, mostly, a place where to jolt down notes, short posts and the occasional in-depth article on topics I am interested in. Most of these would be computer-related, but a few may concern politics. I am not at an age anymore where I could spend days just browsing the internet and learning new stuff, hence the requirement of very strong antispam mechanism and protection against other kind of attacks. Computers are a tool, not an end anymore. It's not about wasting money, surely, but time.

That settles it. If you want something you can just set up and let run itself on the technical side WordPress is what you want. It even updates itself. The other options are a lot more involved.

 

[Cubytus]

If WP was massively attacked previously, then I hope the auto-update mechanism works. On the other hand I read that WP antispam was not perfect, especially freshly-installed. In the meantime, Dotclear is also reputed to be a no-brainer.

 

[S.B.G]

WordPress just made a major point release this evening to 3.6, called Oscar.

• The new Twenty Thirteen theme inspired by modern art puts focus on your content with a colorful, single-column design made for media-rich blogging.
• Revamped Revisions save every change and the new interface allows you to scroll easily through changes to see line-by-line who changed what and when.
• Post Locking and Augmented Autosave will especially be a boon to sites where more than a single author is working on a post. Each author now has their own autosave stream, which stores things locally as well as on the server (so much harder to lose something) and there’s an interface for taking over editing of a post, as demonstrated beautifully by our bearded buddies in the video above.
• Built-in HTML5 media player for native audio and video embeds with no reliance on external services.
• The Menu Editor is now much easier to understand and use.

I use the free plugin Akismet to combat spam and it works great. Here are my 6-month spam stats for my own website.

What the heck is ham doing on my blog? I’m a vegetarian.
Spam most people know; it's the unwanted commercial comments on their blogs. Ham is what we call its counterpart, legitimate comments. On the Akismet mistakes side, missed spam is pretty self-explanatory, and a false positive is a legitimate comment incorrectly identified as spam (which, we hope, happens very rarely). Also, we meant no offense to vegetarians.

 

[glutenenvy]

WordPress is a good candidate for your needs. Make sure you implement some decent security hardening and it will do well.

 

[That-Guy]

Wordpress gets my vote, I use it with two Spam prevention plugins Akismet and NoSpamNX.

Stats since 5th December 2012:

Akismet has protected your site from 81 spam comments already.

NoSpamNX has stopped 11997 birdbrained Spambots (approx. 50 per Day).

Hope this helps!

 

[0dev]

Akismet actually comes with WordPress too IIRC.

 

[S.B.G]

Akismet actually comes with WordPress too IIRC.

It does, but if you're using the WordPress.org version, you have to get a key to make it work, which can be had for free.

 

[Cubytus]

Hey there,

finally went with Dotclear. If the first or second biggest web hosting company still offers it, it must not be that bad, should it? Hoping it will meet requirements.

From a few comparisons I read, DC tends to execute faster than WP, although it only appears under heavier load.
WP has a lot of legacy code inside, making progress slower, whereas DC was built with PHP5 from the beginning
And WP, while having order of magnitude more plugins, unfortunately many of them are Trojan or like.

On the other hand, I am not very satisfied with DC community support, for the one time I had to use it.

 

[S.B.G]

And WP, while having order of magnitude more plugins, unfortunately many of them are Trojan or like.

What do you mean by that?

 

[960design]

...
finally went with Dotclear.

Let us know how it goes for you.

I understand your reluctance to use WP, I was exactly the same. So bad I actually built a custom CMS. In the end I learned that sites get big and you will end up turning it over to some with less experience than you. If they have to learn something entirely new ( my custom CMS ) it greatly slows their ability to take over and takes too much of my time helping them develop it further. Far easier to point them to a WP tutorial. That keeps me working on the next big thing and makes it easy to pass on the torch, so to type.

PS when we are talking about real world comparisons a couple of milliseconds doesn't register to a human. Easy expandability is worth 30ms. MVC and OOP are not the most efficient code paradigms out there. They are used because they are easily scaleable.

 

[Cubytus]

What do you mean by that?

Unchecked, completely open development model with no oversight, much like Google Play. Only user feedback will tell you. Many were compromised a while ago. Or so I read.

Let us know how it goes for you.

I understand your reluctance to use WP, I was exactly the same. So bad I actually built a custom CMS. In the end I learned that sites get big and you will end up turning it over to some with less experience than you. If they have to learn something entirely new ( my custom CMS ) it greatly slows their ability to take over and takes too much of my time helping them develop it further. Far easier to point them to a WP tutorial. That keeps me working on the next big thing and makes it easy to pass on the torch, so to type.

PS when we are talking about real world comparisons a couple of milliseconds doesn't register to a human. Easy expandability is worth 30ms. MVC and OOP are not the most efficient code paradigms out there. They are used because they are easily scaleable.

Well I don't have the energy, time or skills to build a CMS from scratch. I didn't really care about the load times, until reading that faster sites register higher in search engine results.

So far Dotclear is working mostly correctly, except for a bug in the theme used that prevents it to scale titles nicely when they spill on more than 3 lines, as this theme squishes previous posts in two narrow columns near the bottom of the page. No problem displaying actual articles, though. XHTML check is manual, and there have been a few hiccups converting from Wiki syntax to XHTML one. Plus, there are also quite a lot of tutorials out there should the need arise.