I write code all day and spend quite a bit of time working with various content management systems and databases. When I sat down today to set up my own blog, I knew I was never going to write my own blogging platform from scratch. That sort of thing is just not done anymore – unless you’re doing something that’s never been done before (and blogging has definitely been done before!).
.NET
My original choice was a .NET based blog because I’m familiar with ASP.NET and figured I’d be able to customise it. After hunting around, the first thing that I learned is that blogging software is a lot more complicated and feature-rich than I’d expected. Comment spam filters, trackbacks and integration with Windows Live Writer all seemed pretty attractive options. My choices eventually narrowed down to:
- BlogEngine.NET – http://dotnetblogengine.net/
- DasBlog – http://dasblog.info
- SubText – http://subtextproject.com
- Umbraco – http://umbraco.org (strictly this is a CMS, not a blog)
All four of the above platforms were available for simplified install via the Microsoft Web Platform installer:
This time around, I’m being a real software “user” and looking for the path of least resistance. While all four .NET platforms seemed like they could do the job, I rejected them for combinations of the following reasons: lack of reviews, difficulty skinning, long learning curve and effort required to customise. Even though I’ve frequently used Umbraco and it has blogging packages via the community, I didn’t want to spend time setting up the templates or writing custom code for the basic blogging features available in other software.
WordPress
In the end, I settled on WordPress. As a lazy user, this has everything I need and is a well-matured blogging platform with a massive diversity of themes and plugins. MySQL was a requirement as a database backend:
One of the beauties of the Microsoft Web Platform installer is that all these dependencies are detected and resolved for you:
15-20 minutes later, I have WordPress installed, an IIS site set up and working. Themes abound everywhere you look and I eventually found “Oulipo” by Andrea Mignolo. Installing a theme was as simple as copying the files to a subfolder and clicking the thumbnail in the Appearance section of the Admin page.
And there you have it – my first deployment of a PHP / MySQL application, that so far has exceeded expectations, whilst being really easy to set up. As a Microsofty / .NET coder, the only comfort I take out of the experience is that the Microsoft Web Platform installer made the whole process simpler. Actually the really hard part was picking the name (thanks to Richard Parker for helping with that part) and finding a clean-cut look for a blog focused on technical content.