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Blogging platform: Wordpress or Webby?
4 points by inklesspen on Oct 21, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments
I'm relaunching my blog and I'm considering two platforms, Wordpress and Webby/Webgen/staticfiles. I plan to use disqus comments for both, and my requirements include easy embedding of media and syntax-colored code.

Wordpress:

* Simple to set up

* Can write in HTML or use WYSIWYTYG editor. Can post from external clients that support Atom Publishing Protocol or Wordpress's XML-RPC. Can easily post from anywhere.

* Disqus plugin incorporates comment text into the actual page without javascript, so Google can index comments at my site

* Plugins provide relatively painless media embedding

* No good source embedding, but gist.github's secret .pibb format (http://gist.github.com/15914.pibb) provides a stop-gap solution, and I'm sure I could get someone to write a plugin to automate that.

* It's written in PHP and MySQL, and I hate PHP and MySQL.

* Since of course I will immediately become famous and widely read, Wordpress's dynamic page generation could be a performance issue.

Webby:

* More complex to set up -- I have to write posts, run the generator on them, and then upload them to the site. This can be automated, but it's still a higher level of effort.

* Can write in HTML, Markdown, whatever. Can write in my favorite editor easily. However, if there's infrastructure for the blog on my personal machine, I can't easily post from other machines.

* Disqus integration would happen via javascript; Google would index comments at the disqus page.

* Media embedding is more difficult, though a few custom template tags can make this easier.

* Excellent and very customizable source embedding.

* Not written in PHP and MySQL.

* Static files scale very well.

On the whole, I'm leaning towards using Wordpress, due to a lower amount of up-front effort needed, but I thought I'd get your comments, if you have any to offer.



I vote for wordpress. I don't know about the source embedding, but Wordpress performance can be significantly improved through WP-Super Cache (which basically generates static HTML files, IIRC). I use WP-Cache, and that has worked fine for me through a couple spikes (5K visitors one day when I hit Hacker News, was also Stumbled, etc).

I think the main concern comes down to how important embedding source code is, and whether there are any good wordpress plugins that do that. I don't know the answer to that.

Also, Wordpress is relatively painless to backup, move between hosts, upgrade, etc. I cannot speak for Webby, it may also be solid.


Or, better, WP-Super-Cache. It makes static files.


I might get flamed for saying this, but I really enjoy using blogger. I have my blog at a standard domain name, www.charlesju.com, and I have that domain name go straight to my blogger account. I think Blogger really provides everything you need for a good blog:

1. Analytics through Google Analytics 2. Some extra $$$ through AdSense 3. Auto-saving editing for blog posts

I just go tired of having to constantly worry about upgrading my Wordpress plug-in or making sure I pay for hosting and all that jazz, I'd rather just let Google take care of that stuff for me.


I'd pick WordPress.

Sure, static files might scale better, but handling traffic is not usually the problem for most people. Getting traffic is.


I'd vote for Wordpress, just use a cache plugin which will generate static pages.

Unless you're going to do a _lot_ of hacking on it. Because if you don't like to work with PHP/MySQL and you're planning on hacking the internals a lot, you should pick a platform implemented in your language of choice.


Webby is sort of cool for static sites, but it didn't make a good blog at all, for me at least.


Wordpress - There are a lot of awesome free and premium themes to choose from.


Wordpress all the way. Just use WP-Super-Cache. Scales very well.




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