If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
After allowing my account with the hosting provider who hosted my last blog to lapse in mid-December, 2007, I had to fall back on manually posting some static XHTML for a couple of weeks until I could sort my hosting arrangements. I enjoyed building and running my old blog app. It was written in reasonably object-oriented PHP 5 and my (dare I use the word) ‘framework’ was my own design, inspired by a blend of ideas from the ColdFusion community’s Fusebox framework and from Matt Zandstra’s excellent book “PHP 5 Objects, Patterns and Practice”. As is often the case, something you’ve built yourself is so much more satisfying than an off-the-shelf equivalent (even when those equivalents are vastly superior in many ways).
Up until a couple of days ago, I had planned to rebuild my blog using the CakePHP framework, but a combination of time constraints and a now exhausted supply of crack have encouraged me to reconsider. I’ve therefore spent the last two evenings (re-)evaluating the likes of Blosxom, WordPress and Drupal in order to find a highly configurable, simple to implement and fun to use blogging tool, with a close to zero learning curve.
After a couple of years of database-driven blogging apps, the simplicity of the venerable Blosxom with its single CGI script and use of the file-system rather than a database for storage, seemed quite appealing. As was the chance to play around with Perl in a meaningful application. However, I just found its old school approach to be a little too old school for comfort. What’s more, the blosxom website seems to have become a little neglected of late with several broken links laying around, including one or two to some important looking plugins (e.g. the comments plugin!). No doubt there are alternative sources of blosxom scripts all over the web, but I ended up getting cold feet.
Next up was the burgeoning Drupal. Drupal is, of course, a relatively complex and powerful content management system and as a blogging tool is at the opposite end of the spectrum to Blosxom. Despite its generalist nature, among its impressive array of plugins are decent blog publishing and syndication tools. Drupal would also be very useful as a general tool for hosting other personal projects as well, and so despite its less than cohesive nature, I found it appealing. However, an evening playing with Drupal convinced me that it would realistically take several weeks to properly mould it into the shape I wanted, and I simply don’t have the time to spend day after day playing around with stylesheets and trying to figure out how to make it all go to my satisfaction.
Drupal, for all its relative complexity and occasional clunkiness is an undeniably exciting application. It basically gives you the tools to build and run pretty much any type of website, from blogs and forums, through to online newspapers and e-commerce apps. From studying Drupal-related blogs and user testimonials, it’s clear that its “Community plumbing” strapline is not hyperbole.
This is not the first time I’ve looked at Drupal, and I’m aware of its reputation for being, shall we say, not the fastest player on the field. In response to that, hard-core Drupal users generally pooh-pooh such concerns and point out that judicious use of the built-in caching mechanisms enable the system to perform perfectly acceptably - indeed many well known and heavily trafficked sites use Drupal for significant portions of their applications (including ubuntu.com, which recently switched from MoinMoin to Drupal).
Anyway, Drupal is an appealing application, but is not appropriate right now for my humble website which consists only of this blog. Sooo, inevitably perhaps, I set up WordPress and had a play. Despite its position (surely?) as the world’s most popular self-installable blogging application, I had never set up a copy before. Having read, over the years, the experiences of hundreds of WordPress users, I knew what to expect. Without possessing corporate visual slickness, it is nevertheless feature packed with a vast array of plugins and add-ons. It’s thoroughly sorted, and a cinch to install, configure and use. It’s a tightly focussed application that appears to be relatively lightweight - and thanks to WebFaction’s application setup scripts (which include the last dozen or so versions of WordPress!), takes, quite literally, less than ten minutes to install and have running. In fact, ten minutes is an exaggeration, it actually took around five minutes from making the decision to having WordPress responding to requests on test.ralpress.org. WebFaction’s scripts install and configure the core files and MySQL database for you, all you then need to do is to log in and start customising it to suit. All in all, WordPress was a no-brainer really, and it clearly benefits hugely not only from its open and thoroughly debugged code-base, but also from its thriving user and development community.
The only problem I’m now left with is that my domain name, ralpress.org is uncomfortably close to the name of the tool it is running on. Some might interpret this as a lack of imagination on my part, or else as a form of WordPress sycophancy. In fact, ralpress.org was originally coined as a tongue-in-cheek gesture in the face of a blogging world that seemed to have pretty much standardised on WordPress. My blog at the time was my own creation, and it was ralpress, not WordPress. Talk about giving a hostage to fortune 