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by Christian Machmeier.
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As some of you might know, I'm an avid longtime Serendipity-user, since the days of the good ol' version 0.3. Recently, I came around to in-depth test and (more important) compare the features, usability aspects, requirements etc. of S9Y, NucleusCMS, and WordPress. I evaluated which of the products is the most suitable for usage in our corporate website.
My base to start from was BlogBreakDown, which is a pretty comprehensible technical comparison chart of all major blogging tools. There were several software packages in question, which partly failed because of their requirements (like the used programming language as in "blojsom" or "bloxsom") or their license policies (like "MovableType"). So three out of many candidates remained in the competition.
After the more or less immediate starvation of NucleusCMS because of the relatively small amount of ("rocking") features, themes and/or plugins, I had the opportunity to compare S9Y (latest CVS checkout, which seems to be almost as stable as the final release) with WordPress (1.5, which is surprinsingly not bug free, while being tagged as stable), which showed up several issues I'd like to share with you.
Although S9Y already is a very competitive blogging software system, there are topics, which S9Y could improve on. Therefore, I want to bring in, what, I think, might be valuable information:
Of yourse, first comes the first impression. After the download of each software package, I took a look at the code. Result: WordPress has great quality of code on the client side. But S9Y has even greater quality of code on the server side. Therefore, one might get the impression, that WordPress is developed by web designers, that know PHP, and S9Y to be developed by PHP-Developers, that know HTML. Don't get this wrong, I'm definitely not complaining about anything. I just hope you get the idea.
Next comes the installer. WordPress and S9Y come with a relatively small amount of installed database tables, which I do honor for the sake of clarity and simplicity. Okay, but beyond that, WordPress' installer seems to be simpler than the one S9Y makes use of. Although the installation process was split into "simple" and "advanced", WordPress offers just one, but step-based, wizard-like installer, which I think is a lot more handy for end users, because the interface doesn't request so much information from them all at once. It's just easier to follow several simple steps than one huge.
There's only one feature the third system is mentionable for: NucleusCMS has an integrated help system, which I find very helpful, since one could think of a blogging system, that's altogether self-explaining. To achieve that, it should be considered useful to make every single action as simple as possible and offer help every when this simplicity's not enough.
Within WordPress, it's far easier to create and maintain static pages, which is a very useful feature, since it is built right in, and not only available via a plugin as in S9Y.
After you've discovered the options dialog to enable uploads within WordPress, you might still find it hard to think that including images in your posts in WordPress represents the easy way, since the upload interface only offers the opportunity to copy the URL of your last uploaded image to your system's clipboard. S9y on the other side offers a full fledged Media Management, which also features a wizard to include images in your posts. Media Management offers you the ability to store files of almost all types on your server and organize and manage your media in different folders (very handy for grouping things).
The start page within the WordPress administration interface offers "Dashboard", which lists a "Latest Activity" box and news from the development blog, which, I think, is a great and easy way to keep the users of a system in touch with the developers and to inform them about changes, security patches, etc. something like that. I liked that idea very much, since it would be very easy to implement that in S9Y.
Compared to WordPress' really astounding usability (I think, this is an important point), S9Y pretty much seems to need too much clicks to manage a certain task. Or from a different angle, there seem to be too much pages (in the process of creating, editing, managing posts, comments, media and so on), that implement too little functionality. Put that away, make the process simple and clean, and the whole interface will gain more and more slickness, and pertain a greater usability.
Which one is better now?
One should clarify that this is obviously no easy question, because the one right best system, that fits all users' needs perfectly will probably never exist. What else then might be a criterion? Well, to me is seems to be a bit subtle. Serendipity offers more features than WordPress, and what the latter really lacks is something similar as cool as S9y's Media Management, which really rocks. Including images in your posts can't be easier when using this very handy tool. On the other side, what S9y could really improve on are usability aspects.
Everyone, having ever switched from a PC to a Mac, might have had this special feeling when using Mac OS. It just feels right. Okay, it lacks features (probably, this strongly depends on your personal requirements), but the system with the smiling face in the Dock makes you somehow feel better when working with it. The same goes with WordPress, you get the idea. So, if I eventually can give you an advice, I'd recommend you take a deep look at both systems and compare them and decide afterwards which of both makes the point for you.
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