A term that’s uttered quite often by software developers everywhere is that they like to “scratch their own itch”, and I felt the same way when I started looking at software for my website again. While there are certainly good blogging tools and content management systems and frameworks out there, none of these seem to be exactly what I want (often they do a lot of things that I don’t want, and they lack a few things that I do want). While WordPress is certainly sufficient for the time being, I know I want to make something that scratches my itch

Most of the existing products that I have seen and tried are written in PHP (examples are: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and more). Instead I’ll be using my preferred web application framework: Ruby on Rails. I’ll be using JRuby instead of regular Ruby, at least for development. I’ve heard good things about JRuby so far, using it for this project will give me a good chance to see how well it works.

As suggested by my colleague, I will be blogging here about my progress… so stay tuned

After a long time without-brains.net has a website up and running again!

For some time I had thought of developing something myself, but I didn’t get around to it because I had so many other things that I wanted to do (and still want to do) with my time. Besides that there are loads of decent content management systems and frameworks out there, so rolling my own would really just be reinventing the wheel (which is not very motivating). It’s still a hobby project that I might want to pursue some time in the future, but for now I’ve parked that idea

Instead of holding off and having no website (and no blog), I decided to install one of those existing content management systems.

The first system I tried was Drupal (and to be exact 6.14).

I choose Drupal for a number of reasons:

• It’s an established, mature and widely used open source content management framework
• It has many builtin features (that can be turned on and off)
• It’s extensible
• It’s programmed in PHP, which is one of the languages that I can program in

Even though Drupal functions really well, it isn’t the most user friendly system to the user. Out of the box the administration interface is not very intuitive. Also there’s no easy WYSIWYG editor included (there are Drupal plugins to give you that, however I had a few problems with those… especially concerning white space between paragraphs).

The second system that I tried (and am still running at the moment) is  Wordpress. I have used it in the past and was quite pleased with it then, and looking at it now I must say that it has improved greatly!

Wordpress has pretty much the same advantages as Drupal. The main difference between the two is that Drupal is a content management framework whereas Wordpress really is a blogging system. Both can easily enough be extended though

I’m quite happy with Wordpress, so I’m going to stick with it for the time being ]]> http://www.without-brains.net/archives/9/feed 3