Finding and Using a CMS - The Best Content Management System

There's no such thing as the best or perfect Content Management System.

I've designed/written a few websites and webpages, they were all entirely written by hand, hand-written html and php and javascript. No dreamweaver, no CMS (Content Management System), just a plain text editor.

Needless to say, although you get direct control in a hand-written website, the downside is that it can be time consuming, difficult and annoying to update information, and not elegant. Handwriting websites is so 90's.

So I decided to start checking out the CMS world. The problems is, if you are a noob to CMS like me, there are over a hundred of them out there. Technically Blogger is a specialized CMS system in itself. There are so many CMS systems, that it is really hard to pick the one you want to use.

Now if you do a search for the best CMS system, you'll find that no one has a short list of the best CMS systems. The canned answer is "There is no single best CMS. Each CMS is different, and the best one for you depends on your particular needs." Great. No help there.

Finding a CMS right for you is difficult. I installed about 10 different CMS's based on what was the most popular and what seemed best suited to the website I was working on: The People's Climate Pact. After testing them all out, and reading countless reviews on the internet, I went with Textpattern. I highly recommend it if you are a PHP programmer and are building a small to medium-sized website that you want to make easy to update and add to for non-technical people. Textpattern is built on PHP and MySQL, and uses Textile, a very easy to use markup language. There is a bit of a learning curve, as the documentation is spotty and spread out, so that is a disadvantage. But with some hard work and reading, you'll figure out the ropes (it took me about a weekend, although I'm still learning), and trust me, you'll love it. Textpattern is elegant, easy to create plugins for, easy to add code snippets to, and has an easy interface. I highly recommend it.

Alternative Web Browser for Safari on Blogger

I finally found a browser that seems to work seamlessly and fast on my Powerbook G4. Camino! It's fast and works with blogger. It's my new blogging browser of choice. Finally a browser for my mac that is fast and works with blogger.

Uploading Blogger Images Takes a Long Time

Have you ever tried uploading an image to Blogger? It takes forever! I am trying right now to upload an image to my blog where I put up a (crappy) drawing each day, Dan's Daily Doodle, and it crawls along at a snails pace. The file is only around 300K, less than a third of a megabyte, but the upload takes forever, it's been 30 minutes already, so I give up. For those who don't know their bytes, that's pretty small.

Maybe it's just my ISP, but I suspect that blogger is just slow with image uploads. A faster, but more cumbersome solution may be to put up the drawing somewhere else first, than put insert the image as html...

Blogger and Wordpress Early Comparison

My three blog's right now are on blogger. I don't have a lot of complaints. It works, and the interface is clean and intuitive. There are bugs though. The compose tool does weird unexpected things with formatting, so I only use the pure html box. And Safari on my powerbook seems to hate blogger, so I have to use Firefox.

I've been toying with wordpress.com as well. I haven't put any blogs up yet, but it looks easy to use. It has a slightly steeper learning curve than Blogger, but Wordpress looks easier to customize. But on the other hand, you can do more advanced customization with Blogger. And it is more speedy.

Here's a dated but detailed comparison http://jayajha.wordpress.com/2005/09/27/bloggercom-vs-wordpresscom/

I'll update soon with more impressions.

wordpress bug, multiple/duplicate blog on dashboard

So I registered a new blog at wordpress.com today. In case you don't know, they're one of the bigger competitors to Google's blogger. Well, there was a bug, the blog showed up twice on my dashboard (list of blogs). I tried a couple of things to get rid of the multiple listing: transferring ownership, removing the blog, etc.; but nothing really worked. It looks like I'll have to contact their support about this one. They have an interesting support model. They have a support link on their website that only gives you contact info if it is in during business hours. It's an interesting way of offering support.

Having worked on hobby swap I know how tricky it can be to come up with a customer service solution that works. It's an interesting way of taking control of how much time you spend with customer service.

I guess I'll just have to wait until Monday morning to see if the folks over at Wordpress.com can fix my account.

Using WordPress.org CMS

I have been playing with lots of different CMS's (Content Management Systems) and blogging software. There are an overwhelming number out there.

If you are new to blogging and using CMS, like I was two days ago, it can be totally overwhelming. That's okay. I've been there. It's like being a kid in a candy store. There are tons of cool things, but it's hard to pick one thing that is exactly what you want.

I've actually been playing around a lot with wordpress lately. They give out free blogs on their wordpress.com site, and also they have a piece of software you can run on your web server on their wordpress.org site.

Wordpress software is really easy to install on your personal website. All you have to do is download their software, put it where you want your site to be, change some read/write/execute permissions, and voila you are done. And there are tons of cool plugins that are very useful. One called E-Commerce makes it exceedingly easy to sell things on your site. It's amazing how easy it is (with some tech savvy and know-how) to quickly setup an online store.

Overall, wordpress is very cool and easy to use. I like blogger, but I'm definitely going to give wordpress a trial to see if I don't want to use it for some new websites I am working on.

Blogging is Addictive

I must admit it. Blogging is addictive. Even though no one is reading my blog yet, it is a lot of fun to write in this blog. Or I should say blogs. I set up two others. Maybe it is just that writing is addictive. Or maybe this is just another way for the internet to suck away my time.

Google Analytics on Blogger

Well, I looked around for a way to add stats to my blogs, and it turns out that there isn't one built into blogger. So you have to use a third party tool. I decided to use Google Analytics to both this blog and my science fiction blog. That way I can see if my sites are being visited. So if you are reading this... Big Brother is Watching.

Using Google Analytics is easy and takes about 5-10 minutes to do:

1. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics and sign up.
   
2. Put in your blog url and click continue
3. Add in your contact information (everything but country is optional). Then agree to the terms.
4. Choose the "Legacy Tracking Code" or the "New Tracking Code."
   
   The "New Tracking Code" gives you access to new features that become available. You should probably decide on picking one or the other here, I don't really see any drawback to the new code, so I chose that one.
5. Add the javascript code to your blog.
   
   If you're using Blogger, go to your Layout > Page Elements, and add a page element. Choose a HTML/javascript element.
   
   Paste your Google Analytics javascript code into the content box. You can leave the title blank. Save the changes, and you're done! You've added Google Analytics to your site.
   
   Don't add the code in more than one spot, as that will screw up your stats.
   

You can add Google Analytics to more than one site, so it's pretty useful, if you have more than one blog/site like me.