

Wordpress or Typepad? Just roll your own - marketer
http://hoisie.com/post/an_interesting_exercise

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jonknee
How can you not figure out how to make a new Wordpress theme (HTML/CSS) but
yet roll your own which will obviously include a theme of its own (HTML/CSS)?
While I agree a basic blog system is not hard to write, I think the author
just wanted to write his own to be able to talk about it. Making a new theme
was one of the first things I did with Wordpress years ago. It took all of
five minutes to see how it was done and put the design I had into its own
theme. His design is very unoriginal anyway, there's probably even a pre-made
theme for WP that would have worked.

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nloadholtes
I don't agree. I'm not a fan of bloated software (i.e. features I don't use,
etc.), but one thing that Wordpress and Typepad have going for them is a large
user base that helps to uncover bugs like security flaws.

Rolling your own, while a good exercise, will most likely lead to problems.

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STHayden
whatever happened to the "focus on the business" mindset? It seems building
your own blog past the basics a frame work can do would eventually be more
work then just using wordpress.

Unless your businesses is blogging perhaps your efforts are better spent
elsewhere.

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henning
What does this have to do with business? Making a blogging app is a great way
to learn a new framework/language/development technique (say, test-driven
development) that you might have been wanting to explore.

It seems obvious it falls into the category of pleasure, not business.

Now, that said, feel free to tinker so you can learn Rails/Django/whatever,
but _please please please_ add support for Akismet or other robust spam
filtering. Don't make spammers rich with your ignorance.

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jawngee
This is horrible advice and smacks of NIH syndrome.

How did this get modded up so high?

Ok, so instead of focusing on other aspects of your main business, let's
reinvent the wheel and waste 3 months when we could have had the thing set up
in 3 days?

Brilliant! Sign me up!

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Tichy
Although I am currently running on WordPress, I tend to agree. I find I
haven't really tweaked my blog to my liking very much, simply because I am not
very proficient in PHP and I have no interest in learning it or the WP
specific aspects. Also, I am hindered by the security apsects of hosting WP
and the multiblog problems, so I still haven't added the ability to even
upload images (currently using the debian hack for multiblogs, but it doesn't
provide for per blog content directories). The task to redesign my blog gets
delayed indefinitely.

Also, when I think about cool things a blog could do, it is an even greater
hurdle to get into WP plugin development. Would be much easier to do it with
my own framework. Also, the WYIWYG editor of WP seems to suck anyway.

The only rationale for learning to write WP plugins would be to create
something that could become wildly popular (similar to "you have to have a
Facebook app", maybe you also have to have a WP plugin).

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StrawberryFrog
He lost me when he said that Wordpress was "broken" and "not worth the
effort".

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streety
Although I'm generally leaning this way I don't think it is for everyone. I'm
currently using serendipity with a whole block of custom code duck taped on
for the non-blog areas of my personal site.

When I put that code together it did everything I wanted and seemed to be
fairly flexible. That was over a year ago now and I'm again considering a
complete rewrite because making even small changes is just too painful.

If you can clearly see how you'll be using your site a year from now then
rolling your own may work well for you. If not then you may come to regret not
taking the time to leverage an existing project.

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dguido
aka the "how to get 0wned" strategy

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kingkongrevenge
95% of blogs might as well just be a single flat html file edited as needed.
No security problems there.

