My boss wants a blog. Help me choose the backend.

June 15, 2005 3:25 PM

The company I work for wants to get on the blog bandwagon and I need to get things set up. Right now our website is hosted by Verio on a co-located server running Windows.

I have a little, but not much, experience setting up blogs for friends and family members through free services like blogger.com. So installing Movable Type or something on our server is a little intimidating to me. But I will have technical resources at my disposal if I do end up needing them.

We'll need to have the blog be as robust, powerful and flexible as possible. A monthly fee is not out of the question, and is even expected. At the beginning there would just be one poster, but that could change so it would need to be able to handle multiple accounts. I'm sorely tempted to simply use a Blogger account and have it publish via FTP to our site. Will I be backing myself into a corner if I do it this way?

I do realize I'm treading on similar ground as ColdChef's question from the other day, but I'm looking at this more from a professional vs. the personal side of things. And I can throw a reasonable amount of resources (cash, time, energy, etc) against this thing if I have to.

Oh, by the way, I have to get the thing live by Tuesday.

posted by ssmith to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

You could try Wordpress. It's very customizable, and very simple to install. You just have to upload it to your server and presto. You can customize it to look very professional, and numerous political blogs use it as their starting point. I do believe this was discussed in ColdCheg's thread, so I'm just saying that it would work for a professional blog as well as personal.
posted by vodkadin at 3:48 PM on June 15, 2005

I'm going to second Wordpress here as well. Easy frontend, simple theme management in versions 1.5 and up, simple link management and the ability to add ancillary pages( not locked in to the blog format ) within the same frontend which use the same markup rules as blog posts do.

Easiest way to get it going is if you already have a mySQL server at your disposal on a webserver with php4 capability.
posted by mnology at 4:08 PM on June 15, 2005

You won't be backing yourself into a corner if you start out with Blogger.

Just about any major blogging software has import functionality for Blogger. It's not hard to transition from Blogger to WordPress, or from Blogger to MovableType. I'm not sure about TypePad.

Make certain that you have what it takes to run WordPress if you choose to go that route.
posted by tweak at 5:40 PM on June 15, 2005

Beware of running MovableType on Windows servers. MT is a great publishing system, but it's not meant to run on Windows servers. We have it up and running on Windows at my work with 4 bloggers, but it was quite a hassle. It's mostly functional now, but we've found that some important plug-ins (MT-Blacklist, for example) do not run on Windows.
posted by geeky at 5:49 PM on June 15, 2005

Another vote for Wordpress, especially for the newbie. MT is a code headache for a non-coder, and Blogger is sort of in its own world with its own code. TypePad is ok, but Wordpress is the easiest to set up quickly, and their help forum is a good resource for troubleshooting.
posted by yoga at 4:50 AM on June 16, 2005

Response by poster: Great! Thank you all so much for your advice.
posted by ssmith at 6:11 AM on June 16, 2005

Another vote for WordPress since your website is on a Windows server. If PHP and MySQL aren't already installed on the server, tell Verio you need PHP 4.1 or greater and MySQL 3.23.23 or greater on it. Shouldn't take them more than a day. Then proceeed with the WP installation.
posted by junesix at 12:48 PM on June 16, 2005

Don't forget the WordPress wiki! It's extremely helpful.
posted by tweak at 12:08 AM on June 17, 2005