Advise a good blog engine, please

Rails Forum
1

Hello, all. :slight_smile:

I am looking for a blog engines for myself.
There are a lot of them, and each is good in its own way.

What do you advise?

2

Wordpress is by far the best regardless of it being written in PHP.

Over the years Iā€™ve also used Drupal, LiveJournal, Blurty, and Concrete5. Iā€™ve worked with the Rails framework and Django but I wouldnā€™t recommend starting from scratch.

There are many ā€œokayā€ blogging systems out there.

Some review links:

But I wouldnā€™t recommend using them unless you find a better advantage in one that fits you in particular.

With WordPress thereā€™s a free multi-user site already up you can work with, but the best way to use it is to buy your own domain and install an instance of WordPress on it. Thisā€™ll give you full customization.

2 Likes
3

Hello, danielpclark!

Thanks for the answer, but itā€™s interesting to me Ruby, and everything connected with it.

It seems to me a strange answer on this resource.

4

When it comes to blogging re-inventing the wheel is not a good idea. Yes you can make your own blogging site with Ruby on Rails, but that wonā€™t help you get started quickly. When the tools are readily available use the ones you have.

5

Yes, WordPress at the first place on market. Wappalyzer shows 85,1%

But, if look at Ruby?
How about Octopress, or what is actively developing?

6

There are a few that are still maintained:

When you look at them see if they support the latest Rails. Some of them do.

7

Thank you, danielpclark :slight_smile:

I will try different projects, and I will focus on one of them.

8

I would like to spend some word about Jekyll philosophy because (strictly IMHO):

  • if you are looking for a simple blogging engine for yourself and donā€™t want to be stressed with problems like user control, security advisory, hundred of menus to configure options you neither are interested to know why they exist,
  • if you donā€™t want to waste money and time on too complicated server configurations but still own your reliable simple webserver,
  • if you think itā€™s overkill to use a database just to serve your rendered HTML pages,
  • if you want to spend the right time to build up your platform, fix your theme as you need, put some widget then forget about everything else and just enjoy to blog,

then consider using Jekyll and the plugins available out there to build your blogging system.

Octopress is just Jekyll + selected plugins, I would rather choice Jekyll because is actively developed and I like the fact to build a tailored ā€œHTML builderā€ from scratch.

There are pro and cons of any choiceā€¦ if you dig in Jekyll website or look for user experiences in Google you will get several considerations which will help you to evaluate your needs, static blog generators are growing in popularity because of some of the points I listedā€¦ but again, everything depends on what you want to doā€¦ maybe start something as simple as a blog engine might be useful to learn Rails or Sinatraā€¦

1 Like
9

I was able to apply a Jekyll theme to simple markdown with a Github setting and that looks nice. But when I tried to learn and use Jekyll myself I couldnā€™t get anything to work. So I believe that having features with Jekyll is not an easy place to start.

1 Like
10

Hi Daniel, may I ask you what problem you got with Jekyll?
Is it something related to a specific function badly implemented by a plugin or something that Jekyll canā€™t handle smoothly?

11

In Github settings you simply select a theme and it does it for you. All it does is add the _config.yml file with the setting theme: jekyll-theme-merlot. That works great.

Looking into what Github supports for markdown parsing it says it supports Kramdown as the markdown parser. So I tried to use Kramdown specific element tags to right align an attributing reference in a blockquote (i.e. Iā€™m quoting something and itā€™s left aligned in the quote block but the person/source Iā€™m crediting I want to be right aligned beneath it to the right in the same quote). But no matter what I tried through the resources I found on Google I couldnā€™t get the Kramdown markup to recognize its own tags and it would show up in the result rather than being parsed out and invisible.

12

I tried several CMS of them to me so far, what I liked most camaleon-cms.

Still I will try :slight_smile:

13

I didnā€™t include them because their copyright says 2015. So itā€™s a bit old now.

14

This is a big problem when wonderful projects stop supporting :frowning:

I tried Refinery and Jekyll, both looks good for me.
Confuses that Jekyll does not use the database.

15

Hi Daniel, I started directly on my local machine, trying to create my theme and tweaking all options available (reading step by step the online Jekyll docs), so I had a different approach.

Well, your problem with the theme is a little tricky, I have been able to run it on my local machine, but it is important to learn about Liquid theme system otherwise is very easy to get confused.
About the other problem you mentioned, I am using the triple ā€œbacktick + language mentionā€ to format the code section, it should be part of GFM parsing and works fine, for every question which involves HTML+CSS formatting instead of getting trouble with Kramdown i prefer to create small files which contain the HTML part and call them with {% include ā€¦ %} directive.

It is a different system and requires some more time to understand its weird philosophy but can be very useful as personal blog system and HTML/MD compiler for interface experiments :slight_smile: .