As a developer, one of the key things one can do to become a professional is to keep a blog. It’s not just for sharing your own knowledge with others, or firing out rants - it’s also an amazing way to keep notes of past solutions to one’s own problems. The times I’ve stumbled upon my own solution to a problem I’m googling about are too many to note.
But once one decides to actually go about doing it (given one doesn’t opt for a solution like one we provide), there’s a firehose of options these days. Aside from classics like Drupal, Wordpress, or Joomla, there’s:
- Concrete5
- Bolt
- OctoberCMS
- Airship
- Sulu
- eZ Platform
- Anchor
- Jarves
- Fork
- TypiCMS
- Craft
- PyroCMS
- Asgard
- Cockpit
- Lavalite
… and that’s just listing the open source ones! There are just too many options, and choice paralysis is very real. Despite all this, the simple fact is - if all you need is a tool to output your code and thoughts about it, a tool which you can preferably extend every now and then to get a new option or two, then literally anything will do.
All these apps are more or less fine for personal use, and, at the risk of sounding controversial, any feature holes, outdated practices, and occasional non critical security slip-ups they may have (or will inevitably have) are trivial in the long run, because an isolated personal blogging system on a single droplet (ref link) is, even if breached, completely insignificant - especially if modern backup practices are used. We put too much stake into the security and impenetrability of personal blogging systems, weighing one feature against the other far too much, getting stuck in choice-limbo, when we could be using that time for blogging and sharing knowledge.
Granted, for something enterprisey like running a business through a CMS, one should definitely pick something people are more heavily invested in - not someone’s hobby project, and preferably something people have already turned into a company or other kind of legal entity. But a personal blog should be something one can easily style, and crank out content through - not something one spends a week configuring.
Thus, for a personal blog, I’ve opted for newcomer Canvas for now. I’ll be testing it for a while and reporting back, then switching to an alternative. For now, it seems like a system that’s easy to configure, easy to extend, and relatively easy to customize. There’s some Node baggage if you want to custom style it, but it can be worked around. I’m curious to know what you’re using though - and how you feel about the current offer of CMS in PHP land. Let me know!