Possible blog changes

May 29

5/29/2008 11:29 PM

For the thousands, er ok, for the 3-4 readers that care - I may be changing blogging solutions here soon. Haven't decided for sure yet, but I am not thrilled with this current module.

This site is hosted via .NET and I like it for the most part. The content management system (CMS) I am using is DotNetNuke (DNN), and it included this blogging engine you are enjoying right now. DNN is pretty nice and there are tons of plug-in modules available for practically everything you can imagine, but this is currently the only blogging option for it. It is under active development, but compared to the other .NET solutions such as dasBlog, BlogEngine.Net, and SubText, this little blogging module is simply way behind the times.

Now there are many good upgrades coming, but do I want to wait? Since this is open source, and everyone simply gives of their time when they can, it could be months before I see the features I want. Simple things such as:

Better comment management and notifications

RSS feed for comments would rule! Other solutions have it, but this one doesn't. Or heck, it might and I just haven't figured it out yet.
Better email notifications of comments would also be nice. This exists, but the implementation is way inferior to dasBlog (for example).

Support for multiple contributors without jumping through hacky hoops

I'd like Jody and I to share this same blog, and if I want one of my very own I can simply make one. This one was supposed to be shared.

Better archive management. To get the navigation setup I have now required a bunch of lame hacking. It is a pain to otherwise get at old content.

And that is just a few of things I'm annoyed about. I didn't even go into Tagging or Categories!

So I am torn on what to do at this point. As it is I have invested a great deal of time in getting this solution going, so anything new will essentially reboot me. Plus it won't integrate well with this CMS platform if I change.

Content wise I won't lose much (if anything). I may lose some of the fancy picture rendering I get inside posts - I'll live.

Stay tuned and don't change anything for now. I'll keep investigating and decide at some point.

Time for sleep....

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Re: Possible blog changes

I've used at least 8 different blogging platforms and there's only one I can recommend: Wordpress. The the 800lb gorilla in the blogging world and years ahead of anything else out there. It's not even close. By far the largest installed base and largest active dev community. Every feature you mentioned is part of the basic Wordpress install. And there are thousands more to choose from.

By Brett Nordquist on 6/1/2008 10:37 PM

Re: Possible blog changes

If was up to retooling myself towards PHP, no doubt I would go Wordpress. Especially if all I wanted to do was run a blog. However with the resources available to me through work, I can (with time) really do some cool stuff with .NET.

I was playing around with dasBlog and it really seems to work pretty well. So far I haven't found a feature missing that I care about. I admit though that I may not fully realize that I am missing something I might care about. Still getting my head around this stuff...

By Brandon on 6/1/2008 10:56 PM

Re: Possible blog changes

You might want to check out Jeff Sandquist's blog. He runs Channel 9 at MSFT and recently switched to a new .NET based platform called Graffiti. His blog is at http://www.jeffsandquist.com/ and is one of my favorite MS bloggers.

By Brett Nordquist on 6/2/2008 7:00 AM

Re: Possible blog changes

What I hear (or read) when you guys talk about stuff like this:
"blah blah blah...blah blah, blah". :)
I am glad Brett helps me or I would either not have a blog or be on blogspot or blogger and they drive me nuts.

By Kim Nordquist on 6/5/2008 6:45 AM