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the optimal blog software.

by felix.

while i was searching for a plug-in which allows access control to posts based on users and/or user groups, i stumbled about many different plug-ins, some of them very promising, but either dead, not updated for a long time, or simply not exactly usable by producing a long list of php error messages already in the admin screen after activating them. grrreat. well, of course, i could also try to do it myself, as usual. but hey, that sucks: i’d be better of writing my own blog software.
well, i talked about the problem a bit with kornel, and we concluded that an optimal blog system would be a very slim piece of software, just providing the very basic features, i.e. managing posts, comments and pages, users and user groups/roles/whatever, and access privileges, while everything else—such as galleries, embedding videos, gadgets, comfortable post editors, …—is implemented as plugins.
anyone want’s to do this, and produce a well-documented, slim, bug-free blog system with a good plugin interface, together with a few standard plugins? :)

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comments.

Kornel wrote on october 11, 2008 at 22:10:

Or perhaps: Has anyone already done this? :-)

Wordpress is not the only blog publishing application. For example tante has switched to Serendipity. Perhaps I will give some other systems a try…

felix wrote on october 11, 2008 at 22:21:

that’s true, of course. the problem is that there exist too many systems out there, and it can cost a lot of time to find out whether a given one supports all the features one wants. serendipity, for instance, does not seem to support to view certain blog entries to just a specific choice of users. maybe this can be added by plugins, but well, why should i switch in that case?

Kornel wrote on october 11, 2008 at 22:41:

No, you shouldn’t if you did not find the rest more convincing than WordPress…

So, what can you do?
i) write it yourself as an plugin for your current system (perhaps broken in one month with the new release… ;-) )
ii) write it yourself for your current system and try to get it into the base system (very difficult with certain groups of developers…)
iii) write everything by yourself
iv) find a convincing, well structured blog system with friendly developers helping you to implement the missing functional
v) find a already perfect blog system.

So while searching for v) I would also look for iv) before starting iii). :-)

felix wrote on october 11, 2008 at 22:45:

considering how much time i have at the moment, i’d chose vi): pay someone money to do it for you ;)
besides that, v), iv), iii) sounds good in that order.

Hoshi wrote on october 17, 2008 at 12:25:

Did you try Habari? They already have quite a few plugins and it’s a very basic blogging software.

felix wrote on october 27, 2008 at 07:17:

i haven’t tried habari, but i took a look at it. besides from the fact that the documentation isn’t very good so far, i understood that the user management is more or less similarly flawed than the one of wordpress: it seems they simply didn’t thought about finely granulated reading permissions. maybe they also don’t see the need for that.
the problem is just that such a user management with finely granulated reading permissions is not something you should add with a plugin, but which should be incorporated in the basic system itself.
well, i’ll continue my search soon…

spielwiese. » Blog Archive » clean-up. wrote on october 30, 2008 at 20:53:

[...] today i cleaned up my blog a bit – at least on the technical side. i wrote a plug-in which encapsulates all my changes to wordpress, so the underlying wordpress is now a standard installation, making upgrading way easier. moreover, as you might have noticed, i added a login box to the right margin. after playing around in the last days a bit, it seems that my goals can be partially resolved using role scoper. well, not perfectly, but at least to some extend. (so there’s still the need to write the optimal blog software.) [...]