What's the Best Blogging Platform?
When I first started blogging I signed up with TypePad because hey, it was 2006 and Wordpress was still pretty new. I went the fast and easy route. Needless to say, I outgrew their platform within a year or two, I just couldn't make it do what I needed to do. Life happened and I never got the chance to investigate further, and now I'm finally taking the dive.
All I want is a platform that makes it easy to create content, lay out a front page in a grid-like format, and remove all the clutter from the site that I don't want to distract people with (menus etc). Just something basic like this:
I thought for sure Wordpress would fit the bill, after all it's white-hot in the CMS market apparently and it's been the blog platform standard for years now. But after checking it out and even trying some of the premium themes it just isn't customizable enough unless you want to write PHP code; and, well, no thanks, I don't really want to keep my blog in source control and deal with upgrading code as the platform changes. (I'm not doing anything too off-the-wall here IMO.) Shockingly, their layout scheme does not seem to do the simple things I want to do out of the box, and if I'm starting from scratch I'm not going to compromise. (As far as I can tell only the sidebar, header, and footer support widgets, and the widgets cannot exist more than once on a page.)
I was hearing good things about a new CMS called Squarespace, so I decided to take them for a whirl. After watching the videos I thought it would surely be customizable enough to do what I wanted to do, but yet again I was thwarted. While the service makes it easy to create some great-looking sites it seems that you are still stuck with the Squarespace-blessed layout. (It looks like you may be able to do some custom coding to get around this, but I'm not sure if that could even do it, I'm not interested in investing the time in another proprietary platform, and then again I'm back to custom-coding my blog platform.)
The only platform that I know can do what I need to do is Drupal. Somehow thought some of the contenders might win out in the end, but I just can't find Drupal's flexibility anywhere else right now. It's a little more heavyweight than I'd like, but I know that it will at least accommodate my apparently weird-ass layout.
If anyone knows something that I missed on the other two platforms please do speak up, but otherwise I guess I'm plugging ahead with Drupal, I hope to have the new site up and resume regular blogging soon!