Alternatives to WP and MT?

3stripe

Can anyone recommend a good blog/cms tool? I'm looking for something that's closer to a cms with blog tools, rather than a blog with cms tools, which is how i see WP. Have just found Expression Engine which is used on markboulton.co.uk and wonder if it's any good? Seems to be modular and offer plenty of scope for larger sites from what i've seen so far...

jaseone

Drupal? A blog is really just news items plus all the extra pingback/trackback/patmyback type stuff so just about any CMS would do it. What exactly do you want to do? Asking for a CMS is like asking for a Swiss Army knife...

3stripe

Some blog style categories, some static pages, and some way of creating sidebar components that you can slot into either of these... an easily skinnable backend... some way of inserting video content would be good as well for a site i'm working on....

jaseone

You could do all that without too much drama with Wordpress, you just have to edit the PHP templates (my girlfriend happily does it with her blog and she has no programming experience) to do what you want instead of using a User Interface to arrange everything like with the likes of Drupal.

3stripe

yeah i've done some basic stuff with wordpress before, it seems ok - i'm just not much of a coder so wondering if there's anything easier. that said your right it is pretty straightfoward in wp!

nifkin

i still stick by wordpress as one of the best. but in addition to drupal you could take a look at mambo or any of the *nuke systems (phpnuke, postnuke, etc.), but i've never been a big fan of those.

Kosmo

You can't beat WPs wiki, it's just out of this world when it comes to information about a program. And the useful template system is second to none. But if you want a powerhouse that can do it all, you should check Textpattern, many professionals wouldn't touch anything else. And stay as far away as you can from Mambo, it may seem temptin as it is a modular system (one thing that drew me to it at the beginning) but editing the templates just takes insane amounts of work and it's not even valid Xhtml and you can't do the whole template by CSS since most of the modules use tables as basic method.

jaseone

Yeah I had a brief fling with Mambo and was not a fan at all plus now the dev team has split so who knows what will happen. I'd say go with Drupal to see if it does what you want off the shelf if it doesn't then any custom work you need to do will be easier in Wordpress.

nifkin

But if you want a powerhouse that can do it all, you should check Textpattern, many professionals wouldn't touch anything else.

really? once i saw wordpress i left textpattern in the dust. i hated all my templating being done in their admin interface. i'm much happier working with PHP than the textpattern pseudo-tags though, so that could just be me. (also i wanted to start working with podcasting and wordpress just had better built-in support for it.)

Kosmo

Well, basically when templating in WP you have to use those WP tags to "block" out the interface. Basically the same with Textpattern, not to be forgotten that both borrow alot from eachother but people usually like Textpatter as the more flexible of those two. You can check out http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/ as one example how textpattern can look. Ofcourse there is no limit to what you can do with either of them.

jaseone

More flexible in what way? You can do anything you want with WP, if TP made it easier through an interface (does it?) then I could see an argument there or if the tags were easier to understand. Templating WP is just standard (X)HTML/CSS mixed with a PHP function here and there with all of the functions being nicely documented on the Codex. the fact most WP sites look similar is no faulr of WP itself.

FLC

Mint, Vanilla and hicksdesign share the same-ish logo

/me goes to design a green leafy logo

Kosmo

Jaseone, I can't comment further about flexibility of Textpattern since I have very little experience with it. But usually when you ask some of these blogging gurus about their favourite bloggin engine they usually say WP for the simplicity and Textpattern for it's flexibility. There was a lenghty discussion about this in Stylegala forums some months back.

nathan

@FLC: Mint, Vanilla and hicksdesign share the same-ish logo. I think Hicks did the mint logo. Not vanilla though.

unfortunate

Wordpres can be just as flexible as any other CMS out there. Case in point, I'm loving this wordpress design on bombast.org. This guy is full of tricks. As long as you know CSS, the sky is the limit.

Now if only wordpress.com would allow users to tweak their pages with CSS.

Kosmo

Nah, Shaun did the Mint logo.

nathan

Okay. I heard otherwise though. Hicks was also a beta tester for mint. Is there a conntection there? Unlikely.

3stripe

http://bombast.org/ is nice on a pc. on a mac it's beautiful! text rendering is so much smoother on os x - don't think xp can really do css justice =(

Kosmo

@nathan: You heard wrong. "First of all, I truly despise Shaun for coming up with a better leaf logo than I have, but I’ll try not to hold that against him. He is one of those rare beasts, a combination of designer and developer, with neither skill lacking. I hate him for that too." -Jon Hicks Swim in my pool of infinite knowledge :D

nathan

Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Kosmo

No problemo lil' buddy. For some strange reason, that is why I'm here for.