Why a blog?

Why did I choose for a blog (wordpress 2.6 in this case) instead of a fully fledged CMS like Joomla or Drupal?

First I thought about what I wanted. Basically I wanted a tool to store all kind of knowledge snippets (lyrics, howtos, interesting links, interesting thoughts, ...) that I could assign to different categories. Internationalization and ACL were nice-to-haves. Then I started looking for a tool to fit my needs.

Well, there are a gazillion flavours out there. I tried Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. The bottomline is that I liked Wordpress for it's ease of use and and is very nice finishing touches. At first sight, none of them seemed to support ACL or pure i18n without additional plugins. As I will probably only write my entries in English, I quickly dropped the i18n wish from my list.

So I tried the three most commonly used. I downloaded & installed the latest stable version.

When I first launched Drupal, I actually was lost. There were so many options, so many features, so many plugins. But when I started experimenting, I noticed a lot of the plugins weren't up-to-date or didn't do what I expected them to do. The admin interface was overwhelming and too complex for the intentions I had. I was actually baffled that it didn't even integrated with a rich editor (FCKEditor, TinyMCE, ...). When you want to edit text you'll have to use a big ugly text area.

Joomla looked much, much nicer and it came on the second place. If I really needed a Content Managment System, Joomla would probably be the one I'd be checking out. I didn't fully investigate its features (i18, ACL, categorization, tag clouds etc), but I thought it looked promising. Although the translation plugin and a lot of other plugins where still in alpha, beta or development, just like drupal's.

So then I installed & configured wordpress. I did one single post with a nice image. And I was sold. It was simple, I could add a caption to my image and it was displayed nicely in the post. I could add as many tags and categories as I pleased.

And just a minute ago, my browser crashed. Thank you WP for saving a draft. Unfortunately my browser seems to crash each time I want to use the WP spell checker tool. Guess it's time to finally upgrade my Firefox 1.0.4. :-)

The only thing I really miss is the option to restrict access my posts to a single user or a group. I read about a role-manager plugin to add new roles. I think I'll check that out later.