Blogger vs WordPress - a comparison of great products

This blog is written on Blogger - I am a big Google fan and I love a lot of their products. Blogger dovetails nicely with the other Google Apps I use and so it's a handy piece of kit. The interface hasn't really changed much in quite a while - it's simple yet user friendly. If you're looking for a blogging tool, it's really quite good.

I started to play with WordPress a short while ago for a client. They are using it to power their website and the more I've played with it the more I like it. There's a great interface - and I really like the new posting experience on it. Here is a comparison of the three different ways you can create a post with Blogger, old WordPress and new WordPress:

How meta! A blog post in a blog post - this is the Blogger interface

The old interface for WordPress - it has some nice features indeed.

The new posting experience in WordPress. Takes a bit to get used to.

I like the stark simplicity of Blogger - I've created about 165 posts (some of which never made the light of day) here at www.ryv.id.au. On the WordPress sites I manage - and there are a few - I've created about the same number of posts. For quick updates and slamming on a short bit of information, the new WordPress is really great.... actually they're all pretty good for that. Where WordPress shines is the management of images and files. It does a great job importing the files and then laying them out. Check out on the Dejero website some of the picture groups - http://dejero.wordpress.com . Periodically I think I'll migrate this site to WordPress but Blogger has been a solid platform for a long time.

All are free and both Blogger and WordPress are backed by great companies. You can set your own custom URL for them - see www.awpd.org or www.northshockey.org - these are WordPress sites hosted by WordPress. It's easy to set up, apply the domain and off you go. And it's easy in Blogger too!

In a world of content I think that you have to be comfortable with how you are delivering it. These three options (WordPress does count as 2) are top of the line for this sort of thing. Taking nothing away from Joomla or Drupal - they are much more complex and fancy content management systems - and are out of the scope for simple blog posting. It's not as hard as it used to be to get information out there - no more html coding for me!

OK so the major things that I find differentiate between the two products:

• tags and categories are way better than labels - you can do so much more with them
• WordPress handles image presentation on screen better
• Blogger has been better when copy/pasting Word documents (which doesn't happen on this site, but does on others)
• Blogger's minimalist interface gets out of the way of the posting - I find Wordpress to be a bit too fancy at times and it can be distracting
• I'm actually running the middle WordPress on a tiny VM at home - can't do that with Blogger!

Back end stuff is a lot different. WordPress has a multitude of plugins - Blogger none. Blogger's stats are much better than WordPress's (much better). Ad integration is better on Blogger too (not that I really use Ads a lot but occasionally it's very nice when people click on stuff). 

From my comparison of the two I've just been delighted to have the opportunity to use them both in a meaningful way. Pick one, play with it - if you want to move then jump or simply create a couple of sites and mess with it. Both are free and both are great in their own way.

Plone - the open source Content Management System - a review

One of my clients, a non-profit, has a lot of files on it's clients. They need a way to digitally store these files, securely and with availability for certain people. They also need these files to expire and be deleted after a given length of time - usually about 7 years.

These were the parameters I was given to search for a Document Management System (DMS) or more commonly a Content Management System (CMS). There are quite a lot of them, but most are designed for front facing information delivery - that is, to write something, put it up for review, have it reviewed and then published. We do not want this data published ever - and some CMS's make that a bit tricky to manage. So at the end of the day, I looked into several CMS systems that looked like they could be useful.

The first one to be reviewed was OpenKM (www.openkm.com). It looked OK, was open source which is preferable and seemed to have solid security and publishing options. Backing up the database and upgrading OpenKM seemed like a nightmare. I tried a couple of times only to experience great sadness and eventually throwing my hands up in defeat. Scratch that guy off the list.

The next one I seriously considered was Plone (www.plone.org). An open, attractive looking interface certainly helped matters from the get go. I liked it, it looked nice and the decision makers at my client would like it too. Open Source, Linux install - OK good to go. The installation documentation is pretty good, a bit fuzzy at times ( though I do attribute that in part to a lack of solid caffeine) and it was relatively straightforward to get going.

I followed the instructions and started to build the site. It was pretty straightforward and offers different workflow types - so for an internal site, there is no publishing option available. Posts (or uploads of files) are set to either "For Review" or "Private" which is perfect for the application we have at hand here. File size uploads are relatively straightforward to change - there is a config file, much like MediaWiki or similar, that allows for changes to the site that are outside the scope of the in-application setup.

After the build, and setting up internal DNS, outgoing mail and accounts, I set it loose with the client. They have logged in, tested it and come back with a plethora of questions - many many of them. I have changed the security options several times and it's handled it all quite well. Before the system goes into production I'll be making sure backups and restores work. Phone has internal ones that I still need to do more testing on. Stay tuned!