Getting The Right Blog Platform – A Tale Of Two Blogs

Possibly the most far reaching decision you will make when setting up a blog is the platform you will use.

While many might be satisfied with blogger.com or one of the other hosted blog packages the more far thinking blog owner is going to want just a little more control. This is going to mean hosting the blog yourself.

Now assuming that you do not feel the need to buy expensive windows based hosting for your new blog you will very likely feel drawn tot he more popular and less expensive (free) Linux based solutions. Almost invariably this will mean Apache, php and mySQL. It's not guaranteed but it is extremely likely.

Regardless of the final choice of platform it is vital to understand that not all blog packages are the same. Not even those with a common heritage.

Take my personal blog as an example. First I purchased a rather egotistical domain name and then I obtained hosting for it and then finally I choose to locate the best blog package for that environment.

I located a pretty comprehensive comparison and used it as the basis for my choice. One platform (Blog:CMS) seemed to have all the things I needed. Well documented plug-in system, forum, wiki, multi blogs, multi members and a photo album.

However as I started to work with my freshly installed blog platform cracks started to appear. The first time a user looked at the wiki they got a page of error messages and would have to hit refresh to read it.

The forum software was from an other project and the code was out of date. So was the wiki. In fact each “element” was not at all fully integrated to the core.

The XML-RPC system was disabled which meant no pings, no trackbacks and no external API. This meant no joining in the “blog conversation”, no alerting the major lists and a total inability to use desktop blogging tools.

Worst of all the visitor satisfaction all those one time errors. This would mean no return visits, few new visitors and a lot of extra hard work.

My platform was a total mess.

In short it was dead in the water.

To make matters worse the user support was manned by an arrogant, rude and unhelpful young man with English as a second language.

Fortunately it was revealed that this blog platform was a “fork” (where the code is taken in different directions by two or more groups) from another platform. This blogging platform was called Nucleus CMS and it was very well supported. It did not have a built in form but it did have a range of plug-ins that would enable it to co-operate with a number of different forum packages each of which were stable, mature and free.

Furthermore all the core functions all worked and so the blog was not crippled.

I moved in a second and have never regretted it.

But what did I learn?

I learned that just because a package promises hundreds of features it is no promise of quality.

I learned that whatever platform you use it is vital to ensure that the support is good.

Most importantly I learned that the only way you will know what platform is right for you is by trying them out and doing a little quality research.

At the core these two platforms were almost identical and yet it was something as subtle as the attitude of the developers that made the difference between a useful and a useless platform.

It is this that is overlooked most often.

Even if you spend two million on a “perfect platform”, that does everything faster than you can dream, when something goes wrong it will be the support team that you will turn to. If that support team could not care any less or if the development team can not be bothered to provide a security fix then your multi-billion earning blog becomes a pile of rubble over night.

When you select your blog platform it is some of these apparently minor issues which can cripple you. Take a lesson from my experience – even very similar blog platforms with almost identical code can be worlds apart from each other.