CMS vs. Blogging Software - whats exactly is the difference and which would you recommend?

July 7, 2006 4:45 PM

CMS vs. Blogging Software - whats exactly is the difference and which would you recommend?

I've currently got a fairly successful daily "news" site (technology bargain site), running on a partially modified build of Coranto, CMS software. I've been out of the "web design game" for a while now and am frankly pretty EXTREMELY rusty with my skills.

Anyways, I'm looking to update my site but now with all these blogging software packages out there, I'm considering going with one of those. But there's also a slew of new CMS packages out there as well, so I'm having a hard time deciding whats the best fit for me or really what the differences are b/w the two (seems like 2 names for roughly the same thing to me). Here's what the site does/needs:

*Easy, intuitive daily news posting
*Categorical posting of news
*Thumbnails w/ each post (the more automated, the better)
*Comments
*Some user feedback/voting (a la Digg) would be great
*Ability to run polls on the home page
*Ability to EASILY add content to the main page (other than news...probably in side bars/boxes)
*Ability to generate additional pages outside of main page.
*Easy site customization (outside of using a pre-made theme).

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

WordPress will do all of those things for you. You'll need to get plugins for rating of posts (commenting on posts is built in) and polls.
posted by The Monkey at 5:09 PM on July 7, 2006

Movable Type can do all this stuff too, either natively or with plugins. (Disclaimer, I work with the team that makes MT.) But yep, blog tools *are* CMSes, just focused on a particular type of content creation.

You might want to check out sites like Seed Magazine or Garden Voices or Huffington Post< which are all published with Movable Type and have the kinds of features you're talking about. The best thing about these kinds of platforms is that you can (for example) edit your templates in Dreamweaver instead of digging into HTML to make changes and updates.
posted by anildash at 5:56 PM on July 7, 2006

After setting up many different blogs and cms systems, I would say two would work.


Wordpress as mentioned earlier - and that is what I am using now.
http://wordpress.org/about/features/


Mambo and more specifically Joomla. The creators of the original Mambo left and started Joomla, other developers are working on Mambo now.
http://www.joomla.org/content/view/154/52/


For what I needed for my website, Wordpress was a better fit. I have commenting disabled and links to it removed from my theme - so it is really a CMS the way I do it. If I remember correctly voting/surveys are controlled by plug-ins. It is built into Joomla. Joomla was 'too much' for what I needed, but it sounds like a good fit for you.


When I was deciding what to do, I setup ~I don't know how many~ in test folders on my server. These two came out on top. I would say that if you have disk space and database availability, set them up (it is very easy) and take them for a test drive. You could setup a very basic site in 20 mins or so and see what you think.

Good Luck!
posted by Leenie at 6:50 PM on July 7, 2006

A lot of people swear by drupal. But my advice is, check out OpenSourceCMS.com. It provides test installs of many, many, many popular CMS and blogging tools so you can compare them for yourself without going through a full install.
posted by boaz at 7:04 PM on July 7, 2006

I moved from Newspro, the previous version of MovableType, fairly easily.

MovableType or Wordpress can both do what you are looking to do. I prefer MovableType and think their support is good. YMMV, good luck.
posted by Argyle at 7:14 PM on July 7, 2006

A vote for Drupal. The learning curve is steeper than Mambo or Joomla, but the pace of development is cooking and there are modules to do everything you want and much more. The control over taxonomy-based classification and categorization is incredible.
posted by fourcheesemac at 9:16 PM on July 7, 2006

If you're rusty or sub-professional with your web design skills, not extremely comfortable designing (as opposed to just debugging or splicing in scripts) with a text editor, and basically not just all about CSS-based design – that is, if you're like me – you're going to find Wordpress really obnoxious to visually customize beyond editing premade themes because their page templates are broken down into sections. (Wordpress is otherwise easy to work with.) I had better luck designing with Textpattern. I don't know if it can be made to do polls or user feedback but it can do the other stuff. MT is also pretty easy to customize for looks.
posted by furiousthought at 12:38 AM on July 8, 2006

And I'm the local cheerleader, hereabouts, for WebGUI, which will do all that stuff, and more.

You can get it hosted pretty cheap, too...
posted by baylink at 8:05 PM on July 10, 2006