It may have actually been more then a week ago, but you may recall that I decided to take a break from my home grown blog engine and use PyBlosxom to power this site. At the same time, I also moved a couple other blogging sites to WordPress, a GPL’d system written in PHP.

While I do enjoy how easy it is to hack on PyBlosxom, I have to say that the overall user experience with WordPress really does win. PyBlosxom is quite powerful, but it doesn’t feel finished. WordPress on the other hand, has a wiki for up-to-date documentation , simple install scripts, and content importing tools to aid moving between blog systems. It also works out-of-the-box with MarsEdit! These details matter. And you may have noticed, I’ve now dropped PyBlosxom for this site in favor of WordPress.

So why did I drop PyBlosxom? Here’s a short list of pro’s and con’s:

PyBlosxom PRO’s:
– Written in Python and it’s open source.
– It’s rather simple to hack on and extend.
– It was pretty easy to install and get it working (if you’re comfortable in Python and the command-line.)
– I like working with file’s on the file system (command-line tools are good.)

PyBlosxom CON’s:
– I don’t like the single category rule. This is almost enough to strike it from the list of viable blogging tools entirely.
– I don’t like tying publication date to the file mod_time, and the system lacks a native way for the content author to over-ride the publish date. (NOTE: I was using a plugin to address this, but I had to run a custom script every-time I posted to the site to keep it all working.)
– You must add a theme or write your own just to get started. (I know there’s one built in, but it’s not usable.)
– I didn’t find a reliable “permalink” solution.
– Scanning the *entire* file system for every request is rather inefficient.
– No web interface for editing content. I don’t mind this for my own use, but some of the other blogger’s I host for don’t have ssh access to the server.

WordPress PRO’s:
– It’s open source, and I can still hack PHP.
– I was up and running in a matter of minutes.
– It’s got a great admin web interface.
– The default theme is decent enough to start with.
– the XML-RPC interfaces work out-of-the-box with MarsEdit.

WordPress CON’s:
– PHP apps are notorious for XSS vulnerabilities.
– Relies on MySQL and PHP being setup correctly.

I still have to hack on WordPress more before I’ll say that I’m comfortable with it, but so far, I’m a lot happier not having to hack the backend just to post to my blog.