{this article is a work in progress at the moment}
When researching a blogging content managment system that will work for you, there are likely certain features that are really important to you. Do you want something that will allow you to design the entire look and feel to match your website? Maybe something super easy to manage, or lots of extra features like categories, multiple authors and rss feed. Even let you pick and choose what you want?
In your journey to find the CMS that will meet what your looking for, your going to be faced with a lot of different options. CMS's designed for blogging are all over the net, and have a wide variety of functionality, purpose, design, and customization. One cms that works for another may not work for you. The degree of complexity is a step up from the script based cms I showed you before. How do you make the right choice?
I'm going to show you several ways to find the perfect blogging cms that will work for you. Read on, and soon you'll find a match made in heaven...
my personal recommendation
CuteNews : simple and powerful rolled into one!
I personally use cutenews for all my blogging needs and I'm quite pleased with it. It's a nice blend of easy for beginners, and full of advanced features you can use when your ready or if you have the skill. I think its great because it lets you use whatever you want however you want. It extreemly easy for beginners yet also has advanced tools like 100% fully customizable layouts, multiple authors, automatic archiving, comment posting, rss feed, categories, custom placement within any page, admin log in and authoring/editing from a user page, and very easy to install and set up! Some cms's are like hell and back to get working properly, and cutenews was probably the easiest one ive ever installed...and it actually worked the first time! litterally all you do is upload the zip file to your file manager, file manager unzips it for you, log into www.yoursite.com/cutenews , create your username and password and your done! For once something actually works like it says it does, whew!
Another plus is it only requires PHP, and nothing else. This means that if you already know how php's work (or read my previous articles), then it will be very easy for you to learn and integrate into your website. No MySQL is required. (this is a database system where you have to "create" a database for files to go into through the mysql system, and then code files to go into). I cant stress how easy this cms is.
One drawback of CuteNews though is the potential for spamming. The current version does not support spam block on the comment forms. The only way to overide this problem is by making viewers register to be able to post comments, or disable the comment form altogether...even though my website is a pretty unknown place in cyberspace, my comment forms had accumulated 1500 spam comments in the course of one year! I now just use a tagboard for readers to comment with.
Overall for the average blogger, cutenews should work very well for you. It comes with all the features you would want and expect and should do everything you need. But if you require something that needs an image editor (photoblog?), or advanced wysiwyg editor (cutenews is somewhat basic), or page builder (dont want to make pages through your web host file manager?) you may want to look at some other options...we'll look at those below.
CuteNews : simple and powerful rolled into one!
