On Choosing a Blog Platform
When you pick a tool for a job, you pick the most effective and simple to use tool available. You don't use a sledgehammer when nailing down siding. You don't use a band saw to trim your beard.
The same philosophy applies to blogging and CMS platforms.
Lets go ahead and get this out of the way.. I hate Wordpress, and other CMSes like it. Joomla, Drupal, etc. They try to be huge, do-it-all tools, and in my experience, they fail because of their complexity.
Not that they are necessarily hard to use from my standpoint (although I found Drupal a little annoying, but that was some time ago). Its just that they are so feature-laiden that things break all too often. Just look at Security Focus, and you'll see countless reports of security holes reported. They need advanced bug reporting systems because the volume of issues reported is too difficult to handle with more simple means.
I've used, and enjoyed, a few blog/CMS platforms over the years. Lifetype was great when I was using it about 6 years ago, or so. Textpattern is still one of my go-tos for a quick setup blog. I obviously like Tumblr. Hell, I've even developed my own simple blog software using PHP and MySQL.
The reason this issue came up is because I'm currently redesigning my portfolio (again, I know). I decided I should integrate a CMS, and migrate my blog over there, for SEO purposes, and ease of use.
I had thought to myself, "you know, as much as I hate Wordpress, I should probably use it as my CMS, as it is very widely used, and I might as well prove I can manage a Wordpress site".
When doing the planning, and going through the feature list for Wordpress, I started thinking differently. Its exceedingly bloated for what I need, and limits my implementation of the design I have in mind to what is available in plugins (I don't want to waste my time developing my own for a platform I despise).
They make countless CMSes for end users, but where are the CMSes for designers like me? There is a huge disparity in the CMS world. Many target developers, while others target HTML/CSS-lacking bloggers.
I dunno. I may end up giving Wordpress a shot, but I'm not looking forward to it. I've used some awful CMSes in the past. The eCommerce platform, 3dCart, was one of the worst I've used recently. They broke up so much of the template into different areas in the admin section, that modifying even the styles takes FOREVER. As well, you can't go full XHTML Strict, due to backend-integrated code (for SHAME)!
For those that are curious, my new portfolio will be HTML5/CSS3. I've seen enough stable browser support for the features I want to use that I'm definitely down with using it. I'm extremely excited to be using semantic markup in HTML5, as simple as a feature it is. Seriously. Being able to clearly define something as a header, a footer, navigation, etc WITHOUT relying on CSS tags is fantastic.
Oh, and CSS3? Yes sir, I WOULD like s'more..
