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.