WordPress is certainly superior as just a blog system and it can be hijacked for other purposes. I love W/P and set up blogs and psuedo-blogs at ease with it in no time flat.

But for a more integrated dynamic custom site, I use TextPattern. Drupal and Joomla are a bit too top-heavy for me and make it tricky to customize the admin interface to allow clients to login and not mess things up.

Thanks for this great blog post…

I appreciate your suggestions for how one might 'step up' to the next rung of online content sharing by using a CMS instead of a blogging platform, but I think it's important to point out that there are substantial cost differentials between these two options.

Even though the code itself is freely shared, open source solutions like Joomla and Drupal are not 'free' to the user, since the installation and integration costs of these systems are significant – they can run into the thousands of dollars – whereas blogging is almost always a much less expensive choice.

There are also simple solutions for the blog 'problems' you identified (i.e. pointing to content that has passed on to archives) that don't require moving to a CMS, like creating a menu of links to those important posts in a side column.

You can also create static 'pages' (at least in TypePad), for example, where you could presumably set up an rss feed that draws from other posts on your blog or other blogs just like you could on any xhtml page.

But your point about the limitations of a blog platform is well taken when the need is for a more robust content-rich web site, especially if one wants customized interactivity or password-protected member areas etc. on the site; situations where a CMS could be a far better solution.

Amy Lenzo

The Beauty Dialogues