A walk down blog lane

I have started contributing to this blog again and it is amazing that it has been in place since August of 2002. During the eight hours of operation, I have used four different blogging engines and I thought it might be interesting to review.

1. MovableType — This was the very first blogging engine I used. I really liked its ability to host multiple blogs and its open-source design. Interestingly, the system was perl based and had an entirely different architecture from the pure PHP solution of the other two. I moved off of the platform because the authors, Six Apart, decided to make the engine closed source and force users to pay for it.

2. WordPress — I switched to WordPress because it was the big competitor to MT. It was (and is) a mature blogging engine which I liked. The big problem is that it was (and still is) a single blog only engine. There was WordPress MU which is a multiple user version of WordPress, but it was highly immature at the time. I decided to switch to a multiple to a multiple blog engine because I had some friends who I thought wanted to blog. (This did not come to fruition.)

3. B2Evolution — I chose this because it was a true multiple blog engine. It was okay, but the usability left much to be desired. The lack of plugins and add-ons and the complex user interface eventually drove me back to WordPress.

4. WordPress — Now the blog has been converted back to WordPress. I have used the engine on a work blog for two years and really like the technology. It is extremely extensible, powerful and simple to use. Best of all, the next major release of WordPress, 3.0, will integrate MU into the core and so will finally support multiple blogs.

As you can seet, I have experienced a broad range of blogging engines over the last 8 years. WordPress is clearly the best choice and I highly recommend it to others interested in hosting their own sites.

Migration complete!

I have successfully migrated to WordPress from B2Evolution.  The process was completely painless and highly efficient.  There are still some issues with previously posted images and youtube tags which I need to deal with at some point, but the content came through painlessly.

In case anyone is wondering, I used the script located here.  It went much more smoothly than expected.  The process was completely self explanatory.

B2evolution?

I originally implemented b2evolution for this blog because I wanted multi-blog functionality. That is, the ability to host multiple blogs in one instance. Unfortunately, this is a feature not offered by WordPress my other blog engine.

My work blog over at aboutrestore.com relies on WordPress and I had forgotten how powerful that platform is. It is not that b2evolution is not powerful, but WordPress appears to have many more plugins and a very broad and active userbase. If I were to do it again, I would use WordPress here and bypass b2evolution and am still considering migrating.

Finally, this version of b2evolution is old and I am wondering whether newer versions are more intuitive like WordPress. Definitely worth a look since the migration path is easy.