After an uneventful round of trials with several blogging engine, I have decided to stick with my initial choice: ExpressionEngine.
Before I even proceed, I just want to make it clear that I am not bashing any particular back-end technology or siding a "better" engine. Like they say, there are many ways to skin a cat and it boils down to finding the right tool to skin mine. And that for me, would be the ExpressionEngine.
This whole episode started with the search for the perfect solution to my problem. I wanted a blogging engine that is easily customizable, one that could support multiple blogs out of the box without any hacking.
The motivation behind this requirement stems from my personal experience of reading rss feeds. I subscribe to around three hundred feeds which I attempt voraciously to consume daily. Yes I know. It is crazy. It is such a drag when instead of getting juicy updates on a supposed topic of interest, I am getting updates on someone's recent puppy adoption, a funny party attended or political views. Okay I may have exaggerated but it is darn close!
Occasional off topics can be good distractions at times but not when it happens on every other posts. I certainly do not want my readers (however few there may be) to feel the same way I did. I would rather have a separate blog to pen down the personal stuff which I may blog about from time to time and have another one specifically on articles covering subjects like Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR etc.
After hearing so much about Ruby on Rails, I was really keen to try it. I thought it would be perfect if I could use it to work on my personal site. I did some research and arrived at a potential candidate: Mephisto. Mephisto is blogging engine developed using Ruby on Rails by Rick Olson and Justin Palmer.
Despite being a relatively new player in the blogging engine scene, Mephisto has really good reviews and a decent group of followers. I am no expert on the language but from the source code that I saw and my understanding of rails, Mephisto is pretty well implemented with a flexible templating system. Setting it up can be daunting for the uninitiated and it requires diving into the bash. Once that is done, It is really simple to create your own theme and layout. Multiple blogs can be created by having different sections and each sections can have pages or blog entries.
My gripes with Mephisto are the lack of detailed documentation and the slow development progress. To be fair, it is a fairly new engine after all and pretty much still in a beta stage. At its current state, it may be used at a production level for blogs and even content-heavy sites but features are limited and probably require some tweaking. The documentation is badly spammed and definitely could use some cleaning up. The mailing list is a great boon when I ran into problems. Overall, the engine has got huge potential and I am definitely keeping a lookout for the new release. It is ideal for those who like to tinker with early releases and have no major requirements for a blog or site.
Next on the list: Movable Type. Anyone checking out blogging engines for the past few years is bound to recognize this name. Movable Type is almost like the grandfather of blogging engine. It runs on Perl and has recently gone open-source.
In comparison to Mephisto, MovableType is on the other extreme. Currently at its fourth version, MovableType is feature-rich and has a huge library of plugins. Definitely a powerhouse for content publishing. Installation is relatively straightforward and easy. Documentation is detailed and very well organized. The control panel feels really polished and nicely designed.
Although it is possible to create multiple blogs, it seems to be quite a hassle to maintain multiple blogs using a same theme. Each blog actually maintains its own set of templates, making it more logical to treat each blog as a separate site and that may not something I am looking for. Some thing that irked me is that for some strange obscure reason, the documentation does not have information on how to create a theme. Honestly, I did not spend a lot of time on MovableType but I decided to give it a miss, partly because Perl is just not quite something I want to dive into.
Having tried ExpressionEngine a couple of months back, I decided to revisit it. I am not sure if ExpressionEngine is truly that flexible or that my prior experience with its structure helps but I was able to set it up pretty easily and tailor the whole structure to my needs. The templating system is straightforward and the documentation is detailed enough for me to customize the templates. The Wiki is extremely useful, I actually found solutions from the Wiki to solve some of the engine's quirks. One of which is figuring out how to remove "index.php" from the URLs that the engine uses.
ExpressionEngine comes with three versions: Core, Personal and Commercial. The Core version is actually free for personal use and probably good enough to start with. The other versions come with more features like forum modules, photo gallery etc. I am currently using the Core version and still in the middle of putting the entire site together. So far, the progress is good and I think it may just be the ideal engine for what I need. I am keeping my fingers crossed on that. It is definitely on the top of my recommendation list as one of the more customizable and flexible blogging engine. Kudos to the developers!