Silicon Chisel

There are a lot of blogging systems out there. Both open-source and hosted. And many of the hosted solutions are, in fact, pretty good and free. What you lose with a hosted solution is the ability to control your plugins and make modifications. So while this may be fine for normal blogging, if you want to use a blog system as a content system you probably want to install it on a server and have complete control.

All that being said, WordPress 1.5 is probably the best combination of features, ease of use, and good looks out there. The installation is one screen. Just upload the files, rig a database, hit the install.php URL and you’re basically done. There are dozens of great looking skins and just as many plugins. Everything from shopping carts to hit counting is available.

Installing themes and plug-ins isn’t as easy as on a system like Mambo, where there’s a built-in installer system. You need to upload files, edit scripts here and there, and generally know something about how to move around the directory structure. So it’s not for the inexperienced. Once you get something installed, though, it ties into the admin panel nicely and you never need to bother with the nitty gritty again.

The bottom line on extensibility is that WordPress and its developer community give you a lot to work with. As long as you have some rudamentary Linux/PHP skills you can make your blog stand up and do amazing tricks.The authoring system is nice and streamlined. You can even author by email. One nice thing is that any entry can belong to multiple categories. Some systems limit you to one. A lot of CMS’s could learn from this as very often it is desirable to have an article belong to two parts of a content structure.

You also have flexibility in how you encode your URL’s. You can chose to have mod_rewrite just put up category/article_name for the path. Or you can embed year, date, or a list of other parameters. It all depends on how frequently you expect to post and how you want your structure to look. Again: WordPress’s flexibility really shines here.

There are a lot of bloggers available now. Some have more powerful features than Word Press, some are more advanced technically. But WordPress really seems to have hit the “sweet spot” in terms of allowing a webmaster to quicky put up a nice looking, full-featured blog, that any client can run with a minimum of instruction.