A couple days ago I had temporarily disabled new member registrations to Oddball Update, given that I wasn’t sure I was going to continue using the pMachine weblog system. Well, after having tried out three different packages of blog software, I’ve decided to delete them all and come back to pMachine. Thus, new memberships have just been re-enabled. Register away.

During my “travels,” I’ve come to the conclusion that there really is no “perfect” blogging software. At least, not for my needs. I’m looking for something that:

• Is dynamically driven from a MySQL DB via PHP
• Features user memberships with various levels of access
• Prevents anonymous comment posting
• Is extensible and customizable enough to allow me to create alternate indexes and templates
• Has a feature-rich, easy-to-use content management interface (backend)
• Does all of the above mostly out-of-the-box without requiring weeks of custom PHP coding

So far, there is no single weblog package that can do all of this well enough to suit me.

I have tried Movable Type, pMachine, b2, Drupal and Nucleus, in that order. There are things I like about all of them (well, most of them), and things I don’t like. As illustrated:

MOVABLE TYPE

Pros: Best backend interface; huge user community; highly customizable; tons of support and cool plugins available
Cons: No user memberships or security features; static pages must be rebuilt using Perl on each update

PMACHINE

Pros: Awesome user/security featureset; fast PHP/MySQL data drive; good backend interface
Cons: A lot of stuff is hard-coded or limited in use; “Pro” version requires $45 payment

B2

Pros: Fast PHP/MySQL data drive; clean and simple
Cons: Small community; the guy who developed it hasn’t been seen in almost a year

DRUPAL

Pros: Immensely powerful; based on PHP / MySQL; best collective content management features; nice user/security roles; very Slashdot-like
Cons: Somewhat draconian with steep learning curve; a bit of overkill for a simple blog; can’t seem to restrict access by content type

NUCLEUS

Pros: Clean and fast; based on PHP / MySQL; has some good plugins
Cons: Extremely basic; similar to pMachine but doesn’t have as many features

So, as you may have guessed, the whole blog thing has turned into a bit of a conundrum this weekend. After testing all these different packages out, I decided to stick with pMachine for the Oddball Update, at least for now. On the upside, however, it seems that I will be attempting to use Drupal as the engine behind an upcoming “Developer’s Area” website I plan to put together for some friends and I, since it seems perfectly suited for such a task. Using the “collaborative book” tool, I may even be able to easily support some of the features we needed, namely a character database. Originally I had hoped to allow access to that site via the same user memberships and security features here on the Oddball Update, but now it appears they must be separate entities. Score one against content integration, I guess.

Oh well — what I’ve got now works, so I’m going to keep it!