Blog Beginnings

I’ve had a busy week, but I have not completely abandoned my blog software research.

Last Sunday, I checked out the book Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress. The book contains a lot of information, but what I really need is a comparison between the products.

This morning I discovered a site that compares the various CMS (Content Management Systems). This CMS matrix lets you choose several of the available products and creates a table that shows their supported features.

I’ve also discovered various sites discussing the pros and cons of the available packages, but I think there is no substitute for downloading the software and trying out. Unfortunately this involves a lot of time.

At this point it seems like the most interesting packages are WordPress for Blogs, phpBB for forums and Drupal as an all-in-one solution. The only one I’ve tried to this point is WordPress. I like it’s look and ease of configuration, plus there seems to be tons of support for it.

The trouble is there is no true support for forums. There is a WordPress add-on in the works called bbPress, but my initial impression is that it lacks the look and feel other bulletin boards offer. I know they are trying to keep the implementation simple and lightweight, but I still would like access to fancier features.

PhpBB is the big public domain bulletin board software package. I am sure it does everything anyone can think of in regards to forums. So much so, that some complain it suffers from feature bloat. Plus, it is forum software with no real support for integrating with a blog like WordPress. It would be lame if a website required one user logon for commenting to a blog and another for posting to a forum.

Then there seem to be a myriad of other forums software packages (such as PunBB, UseBB and Vanilla). They all seem to be sincere attempts at developing a clean, usable forum-based website. I am sure they all have their strong and weak points, but it would take many, many hours to delve into them all.

Maybe they are the way to go. If anyone reads this and has some insight, I’d appreciate any suggestions. My goal to is create a website that supports both blogging and forums that can be easily administered by non-tech people.

My next step will be to take a closer look at Drupal. It seems like it has everthing I would need. My only concern is that some people have implied it is not as easy to maintain as WordPress.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!