Belchfire Search Engine Marketing

Well I’ve been using WordPress for a couple of years now and decided to look around at the other options out there for software, as opposed to a service. I like control so a hosted blog isn’t something that interests me.

Anyways, found some nice comparison charts of various blogging and personal publishing systems at asymptomatic.net so tried a few out. I was looking for something that would support multi-site and multi-user.

Moveable Type was arguably the most mature, polished, feature rich and userfriendly of all. But, the licensing costs for 50+ users eliminated it as a possibility. Although, given the choice and money being no object, I’d use MT in a heartbeat. This is how blogging should be!

ExpressionEngine was the most feature-rich and configurable, and the licensing costs are 10 times less than MT for the same number of users. But, in my opinion it was far TOO configurable. There were simply too many options for the average user. The other issue I had with it was it is NOT easy to change the theme or layout of the site after it’s been installed (no ‘one-click’ theme switcher). Yet, all the advertising and support tells you it’s ‘so flexible’. Say what? So if it’s so flexible, why is it so difficult to change the look of one’s site? Isn’t that the entire point of CSS? Separate style from content? Anyways, just seemed like an unnecessarily steep learning curve. Attractive to the tech-saave I’m sure, but not for me thank you very much.

Nucleus CMS looked very promising. Multi-site, multi-user, open-source (free) and easy to install and configure. Despite it’s name, is not a true CMS (Content Management System) such as PHP-Nuke, postnuke, Mambo, etc.

I found the Admin interface somewhat counter-intuitive to use (despite the navigation menu on the left of the screen) but apart from that, not much kept me from using this fine product. Specifically is was poor documentation to enable search-engine-friendly URLs and if you manage to get them enabled, not human-readable.

Drupal shares many of the same features as Nucleus CMS but is a true CMS, which just so happens to do blogs. But I don’t want a CMS that can do blogs. I have and have had many CMSs. I want a system designed to do blogs, not a CMS for which blogs is a component, module, or anything other than the core of the system as you almost always lose some functionality or features when something is an afterthought…

So back I come to WordPress. While not multi-site (requires separate install for each), it is one of the easiest blogging systems to use, configure and install. Feature rich and has both SEF URLs that are also human-readable. Easily extensible via plugins and skinable via themes, for which there are hundreds of each available, unlike most (if not all) of the closed-source systems. Great community also.

So there you have it, by no means a complete or comprehensive list or investigation of all available systems but I did download, install and configure each of the above so my comments are what I observed and experienced. Your results may vary.