I stated earlier that I’m the type that just has to try new blog software from time to time. I’m sure there are quite a few similar bloggers out there as well. So, I decided to try out Blog:CMS. It’s nothing new, and the framework it is based on (i.e. Nucleus) is even more established.

I’ve never used Nucleus, so quite a bit of what I’ll be praising or damning about Blog:CMS has probably been seen in Nucleus too. But before I continue, I have to say that I met some wierd, if not unique, problems in the installation of Blog:CMS. Actually, I’m quite sure it’s not a Blog:CMS problem, but rather my host’s problem. Nevertheless, I’ll spill it in case someone else happened/happens to experience the same thing.

When I was uploading, yes that’s right, just uploading the Blog:CMS installation through FTP to my host, I was informed by support that one of the files, times.php, caused a heavy load on the server my blog was hosted on – resulting in the temporary deactivation of my account. It was a crappy time, but the problem was unlikely to be caused by Blog:CMS.

Now, on to the more solid stuff. Integreated features-wise, I’d say that Blog:CMS has much more than WordPress or Movable Type. Blog:CMS has wiki and forum support packaged in the default install for one. The default plugin set of Blog:CMS also offers Latest Comments, Latest Post, Related Entries, a RSS Feed Aggregator, Comment Preview, Contact Form, Most Viewed, No. of Views, Post Rating (through some sort of Karma thing), polling, plugins to make posts print-friendly or into .pdf files, and others. All of this is not available in WordPress’ or even Movable Type’s default install. But as emphasized by their (WP and MT) creators, this was intentional to ensure that the two softwares do not become feature bloated.

But so far, I’ve found plugin editing to be much more irritating if compared to WordPress. I ‘ve never missed the WP Plugin Editor as much before. And all I wanted to do was to modify some printed text in one of the plugins. But I suppose WordPress’ easy plugin editing is the exception rather than the norm. Moreover, the Blog:CMS default implementation of Related Entries (i.e. showing entries related to the current post) is, in my opinion, not as useful as I would have liked. According to documentation, the plugin will display related entries with body text that includes words from the title text of the current post. I’ve found that it will also display related posts by looking through the body text of other posts for keywords that you can specify during post creation. Good yes, but I prefer one of the many related entries WordPress plugins that allows you to choose specifically the posts that you deem related to the current one.

Templating for Blog:CMS is more segmented if compared to WP and MT. For one, Blog:CMS has both templates and skins. An excerpt of the official documentation:

Skins define how your sites look. Each skin consists of several types: one for the main index, one for the detailed item pages, one for the archive, … The skins also contain instructions of where to include a weblog, and which template should be used to do so.

Ha! This means templates are used to define the way the weblog block in your page looks like. The reason why templates aren’t included in the skins themselves, is that several skins can use the same template to display a blog.

Secondly, Blog:CMS has an ExtraSkin plugin which really is just an implementation of the template includes system that WordPress themes already use (i.e. separate templates for headers, footers, sidebars, etc.). But while all this segmentation provides significant flexibility, switching back and forth between the various Skins, Templates and ExtraSkin pages can be a tremendous irritant.

Overall, I’ve found Blog:CMS to be a pretty powerful piece of software. But while it isn’t particularly difficult to learn, I feel that it isn’t very easy to use. I’ll continue trying out Blog:CMS to see if it’s a matter of acclimitization. But I’ll keep it to just one blog.

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