Chris Garrett

CommunityServer is the second of the two .NET platform blog systems in our blog package reviews. It is also the first of the two systems that are more “platform” than “blog system”. CommunityServer is used in many high-profile Microsoft sites such as the official ASP.NET site, XBOX forums and the MSDN blogs, let’s see if it measures up to expectations.

What do I mean by a “platform”? Well where the other systems in these reviews have been content management systems or just blogging packages, CommunityServer (as the name suggests) encompasses much more community-oriented functionality (forum, gallery) and therefore is a foundation to build more than just blogs.

I was torn between reviewing the new 2.0 beta or the current release, the new version has lots more features. In the end I decided to be fair it would have to be the current release and come back to the version 2 when released.

While CommunityServer is the property of Telligent, you are free to use the software with no charge for commercial or non-profit uses providing you show a button image. If you do not want to show the image there is a commercial option. All the information about CommunityServer can be found on the nice looking dedicated site which is itself running the software. As well as the usual documentation and support forum there is also a blog and associated newsfeed.

Installation

To install CommunityServer you will need a web host running ASP.NET and a SQL Server database or the free MSDE equivalent. To download the files you need to fill out a small form, the download link is sent to the email address you provide. This is not too much of a problem but it might put some people off.

Installation is simple enough. My one tiny niggle is they have this lovely wizard type of affair but you still need to edit a couple of files, still straightforward though and certainly up with the best of these reviews. I am told in the next version it will be even easier.

Ease of use

Logging in as an administrator you are faced with quite an array of options, logging in as an individual blogger and there is a simpler interface. This is to be expected and perhaps the lesson is to have an account for blogging and another for administration.

Immediately reading the name of the thing we know this is not aimed at the single blog scenario. The idea is you can create a full community with member blogs, a central blog home page and discussions etc. If you do want a single CommunityServer blog though it is certainly capable of that (if a little overpowered).

Posting is easy enough, just like DasBlog you have one of those rich HTML editing widgets and it even works in Firefox. I didn’t see how to have sub categories but you can have multiple categories. Sometimes logged in as admin you do find yourself clicking around just to get back to your posting interface, when in “blogging mode” it really ought to keep your on your blog. Just a little usability niggle but little niggles tend to grow when you use something day in, day out.

RSS and Atom feeds are provided at the “blog group”, blog and category level.

Comments

Comments can be moderated or not and can be from registered users or anonymous. There is also a post flood option.

Search

Search is enabled by default allowing you to search at individual blog level or all the blogs at the blog home level.

Ping and Trackback

Trackbacks are automatically catered for. The current version does not ping.

URLs

Your blog has friendly URLs by default in the format year/month/day/post.aspx but at post time you can also specify the filename.

Overall Search Engine Friendliness

As with DasBlog there is the usual asp.net javascript and viewstate junk in the source but the rest is tidy XHTML+CSS.

Template flexibility

While there is not much to choose between the provided templates they are pretty easy to figure out. I hope the selection for version 2 are better looking. Telligent would do well to take a look at those available for competitors.

Extensibility

There are many people building on top of CommunityServer in the .NET community. You can add code to the templates, there are lots of hacks plus of course you can download the code itself.

Support

There is a support forum and the developers are really responsive. If support is very important to your over and above this then you can pay for it

API/EMail

Metablog API is available as an addon. Looks like email support is only available for the discussions, not blogging.

Static pages/Articles

Static articles are created very similar to posts but appear in the articles folder. You can choose the filename and if you want to enable comments.

Stats and reporting

Stats are provided at post level allowing you to see hits and referrers.

Summary

This is a very polished product. Had I not read about what is coming with version 2 I would have been very happy with the features, the install experience and with blogging (overall). I hope one of the updates in the new version will be around usability. Community Server is definately up there at the top but has it got what it takes to beat WordPress?

As a package for multiple authors and multiple blogs I would say yes. If this is your market then take a look. For an individual, no way. It is certainly capable but not friendly enough in that scenario and the availability of excellent WordPress template designs could tip the balance. We will see in the next review if Community Server can maintain the overall “multiblog crown” but for .NET fans it is really the only choice.

1. Introduction
2. CityDesk review
3. Movable Type review
4. WordPress review
5. bBlog review
6. DasBlog review
7. CommunityServer review
8. Drupal review

DasBlog is the first of the two .NET platform blogs in our blog software reviews. Let’s see how it matches up to the LAMP packages.

Visiting the DasBlog homepage takes you to a wiki. I can understand from a content management point of view why the developers have gone this route but personally I find it off-putting. I dug around looking for an official newsfeed and couldn’t find one. The developers blog updates though so you can subscribe to their feeds in lieu of an official one.

DasBlog is in a similar market to bBlog, the single blog single author type of installation. The choice between them at first glance comes down to a platform choice but perhaps there might be a winner based on other factors?

Installation

You can either download just the files needed to run DasBlog or the full C# source (the source is provided under the BSD license). Download the zip package from SourceForge.net. You will need a Windows/IIS host with the .NET framework, no additional database is required as the data files are saved as XML.

Providing you are running Windows with IIS and .NET installed, installation couldn’t be easier. Simply extract the zip file and upload the dasblogce folder contents to your hosting space. If you are installing locally then you can run the CreateDasBlogVdir.vbs script to set up the web application.

My one real criticism of the installation is it really ought to get you to change your password on first login. Other than that it works just fine.

Ease of use

For posting I would say DasBlog has the easiest interface of them all. By default it uses one of those rich HTML editing widgets rather than a plain old text box (though you can switch to HTML source view) and you can even upload images and RSS enclosures as well.

Your post can be in multiple categories and you can have sub categories. Categories automatically get their own feeds as well as the default RSS and Atom feeds.

Comments

Comments are moderated but no registration is required. There is a captcha facility and blacklist support also.

Search

There is a decent enough little search facility as you would expect and a nice touch is it highlights your keyword in the results in “highlighter yellow”.

Ping and Trackback

The software does the full range of trackbacks, pings etc both automatically and by specifying URLs.

URLs

If you set the option in the configuration screen you get permanent URLs and can use friendly URLs, otherwise it uses a pretty nasty ugly globally unique ID kind of format.

Overall Search Engine Friendliness

Being a .NET site there is some extra javascript and “viewstate” garbage where the code could have been a bit more lightweight but nothing that would stop your site being indexed.

Template flexibility

16 so-so template themes are included and the templates are pretty straightforward to work with. Apparently thier templates are based on those in the Radio Userland/Manila software. The syntax is simple enough that anyone who could work with the competitors templates ought to have no problem here.

Extensibility

The templates support macros but to really extend it you can either embed runtime asp.net code or hack away at the source.

Multiple Authors/Blogs

While you can have multiple authors (by hacking the security configuration XML file) I don’t think this is the ideal tool. Multiple blogs wold require copying the folder to create a new blog.

Support

I have found the developers very responsive and the product is well known in the .NET community. Having said that it is not going to be the best supported by third-parties out of the products reviewed. The documentation is rough around the edges but there is a forum.

API/EMail

Being a .NET application the developers have taken full advantage of .NETs web service support so DasBlog has full Blogger/MovableType/Comment API support and capability to blog by email.

Static pages/Articles

There is no direct support for non-blog pages but there is a rather complicated hack.

Stats and reporting

You get some basic stats which is more than you get in the majority of these systems. In the “activity” page you can see search engine phrases, referrers, click throughs and aggregator hits.

Summary

DasBlog is a suprisingly fully-featured system. For simplicity and features it beats bBlog, it’s closest rival in terms of target market, and has some features that Movable Type even lacks. Bigger picture though I can’t see a general user choosing this over MT or WordPress.

It is definately a good choice for someone looking for a single .NET based blog though. Knowing that CommunityServer is not aimed at single bloggers, in the single .NET blog scenario I would say DasBlog is the top choice.

1. Introduction
2. CityDesk review
3. Movable Type review
4. WordPress review
5. bBlog review
6. DasBlog review
7. CommunityServer review
8. Drupal review

Today’s post is the half way point in this series of blog software reviews. Yesterdays WordPress review is going to be a tough result to beat. Let’s see if bBlog has what it takes.

bBlog is another PHP and MySQL open source effort licensed under GPL. While Apache is recommended it doesn’t say you can’t use Windows/IIS but the docs do seem designed to discourage it. I wasn’t about to change operating system for a blog, especially after seeing previous packages work fine, so perhaps I deserved everything I got..

The bBlog website is the most amateur-looking so far. It is easy to miss the news feed, I finally found it with the help of Google.

Ease of installation

Installation was easy, a couple of bugs seemed to have sneaked into the process though as you will see from the screenshots. The field names on the form were black on black so I had to “select all” to read the captions for each textbox.

This might have just been on my system but it spoiled the whole process somewhat. I would be interested to hear if it had happened to anyone else. Another problem was my mistake but perhaps should have been easier to recover from, when it asked for my blog url I missed the trailing slash thus all my link paths were broken. A little validation goes a long way!

Ease of use

The interface is not pretty by any means. The theme with the whole product seems to be “basic, but works”. It does the job and I have no real complaints. Again, maybe only my system, but every click seemed to throw up PHP errors.

Flexibility of posting formatting

As well as HTML there are plenty of options, more than the previous packages. You can use HTML, can have newlines and URLs automatically converted (nice, I like that) or use BBCode and textile. Posts can be draft or live and can be under multiple categories. You can also split a post using a “read more” comment tag.

Comments

Visitors can comment but not using registered log-ins. You can moderate comments though, selecting between none, all or only those containing links and choose a flood level.

Syndicate RSS/Atom feeds

You get RSS and Atom feeds plus there is a curious feature for creating custom feeds for sections (categories).

Search

While there is talk of a search feature and my download contained a search.php file, it didn’t seem to work. Others have provided plugins though.

Ping, Trackback

You can send and receive trackbacks, plus you can add a list of ping notification sites.

Categories

You can add categories and have a post under multiple categories but sub-categories are not supported.

URLs

As would be expected friendly URLs are achieved through Apache .htaccess

Overall Search Engine Friendliness

All seems fine, good solid standards compliant code throughout.

Template flexibility

bBlog uses Smarty which is a good popular templating system and for some developers and designers has to be a major plus point. No problem adding any code you like, including advertising code.

Extensibility

PHP/MySQL, plug-ins and of course tweaking the Smarty templates.

Multiple Authors/Multiple Blogs

It seems from reading the docs and forum it is really a single author and single blog despite what it says on the site. There is a hack for multiple authors though.

3rd Party support

There are some enthusiastic developers supporting bBlog with hacks and plugins but not exactly the vibrant marketplace of the competition.

Technical support and documentation

There is a forum and a Wiki. Comprehensive is not a word I would use to describe it.

API, Email

Supports XML-RPC for the MetaWeblog API but there is no support for blogging via email.

Static pages/Articles

You would need to add your own static pages and hack the templates.

Stats and reporting

There are no stats so you would have to roll your own, analyse your hosting logs or use a third party hosted service.

Summary

Now I am at the end of this review I wish I had looked at bBlog before the others, I am sure it would have turned out much different. This system has a lot going for it and with some tidying up in the aesthetics, user experience, documentation and organisation it could be a killer blog app. As it stands though it just doesn’t compare well with WordPress or Movable Type. There is nothing available here that would make me choose bBlog over another so I am afraid WordPress is still in the lead, followed closely by Movable Type.

1. Introduction
2. CityDesk review
3. Movable Type review
4. WordPress review
5. bBlog review
6. DasBlog review
7. CommunityServer review
8. Drupal review

In this review of the series I am looking at Movable Type. After the so-so performance of CityDesk just on reputation alone I am hoping for great things from this product.

Movable Type has been around the block. Believe it or not the first version was launched only in 2001, for some reason it seems way older. Four years though in blogging is a long time so you can consider Movable Type very mature and very stable (latest version is 3.2). You can keep up to date with releases via RSS.

Technical requirements

To install Movable Type you will need Perl (plus optionally PHP), and capability for BerkeleyDB, MySQL, SQLite, or PostgreSQL databases.

Ease of installation

Downloading Movable Type from the website is the easy bit. To actually install the beast if you haven’t already got the required software you will need a little experience of setting up and configuring Perl, Perl modules, MySQL and PHP. I didn’t have these things locally so my setup challenge might be a little harder than many of you.

I would not say it was easy but I managed to get there in the end partly by following the Windows specific instructions (which seems a little out of date). An experienced friend might be a worthwhile resource to have on hand for the timid.

Ease of use

Once you are up and running the initial interface can seem very daunting but once you have familiarised yourself with the options it is all very logical and compartmentalised. It is a very comprehensive system so the masses of options is only to be expected.

Having to rebuild your blog every so often is a little tiresom but once you are happy with it only the individual posts need be created and you can fall back on a dynamic site rather than producing HTML files.

Flexibility of posting formatting

There is a set of formatting buttons for bold, italic, etc but these simply help you add the relevant HTML tags – you have freedom to use whatever HTML formatting you choose.

User registration for comments

You can specify that comments must be by authenticated users and use the TypeKey service or use another third party solution. There are also moderation options or you can have comments appear right away. There are also pretty decent spam protection facilities built in and available as plugins.

Syndicate RSS/ATOM feeds

By default your feed is output as ATOM and RSS 2.0, I would have suprised had you not been able to in a system four years old!

Search

Search is there by default and other more comprehensive solutions are available.

Ping, Trackback and Pingback

Just tick a few tickboxes in settings and you can accept trackbacks, auto-discover trackbacks, and ping the popular services and add any of your own.

Categories and Tags

You can manage categories, add categories when creating a new post and have a post appear under multiple categories.

Permanent URLs and Friendly URLs

Posts appear as static HTML pages and are organised in year/month folders. You can set the filename of the page for your post at creation time and optionally output PHP files.

Overall Search Engine Friendliness

The default HTML and structure seems nicely formatted with DIVs and CSS and there is complete flexibility for further tweaking.

Template flexibility

Templates are well structured and there seems to be a fair few template tutorials out there. The best thing is the plugin that allows you to browse template styles and apply them to your blog. I chose the rubber ducky one, I think it looks pretty cool. Hum..

 

Extensibility

There are a whole bunch of plugins available to download and for programmers Movable Type allows you to edit the PERL source, use PHP for your output instead of HTML, plus you have a MySQL database of content to work with.

Ability to paste advertising code

No limitations here plus there are one or two plugins to make it easy, Chikita for example.

Multiple Authors and Multiple Blogs

There is good central control of authors and blogs, there is no reason why you couldn’t use this as the beginnings of a blog network.

Developer support, ISP support and Community support

Movable Type is a mature system built on a very stable platform, there is no shortage of third party support for this product and no shortage of developers and designers willing to work with it. You can get hosting right from the partners page.

Technical support and documentation

There is everything you might need from knowledge base to forums. The product is so well known you will not need to look far for peer help. You will definately know a friend of a friend using MT.

Cost/License

There is a free unsupported personal (single author) version, a $69.95 5 author version and a $99.95 unlimited version.

API, Blog by email

Movable Type supports the Atom and Metaweblog APIs.

Static pages/Articles

While out of the box MT doesn’t support the creation of About pages and articles, there are workarounds basically involving creating custom templates.

Type of database

BerkeleyDB, MySQL, SQLite or PostgreSQL

Stats and reporting

While it is certainly possible to output your posts as PHP, by default posts are static HTML so you would need to use ISP logs or an external tool. There are plugins that patch this hole somewhat.

Summary

So only the second review in but Movable Type is definately in the lead. We have a benchmark for the others to beat and it will take quite a lot to displace it. The only thing letting Movable Type down is the installation process, but coming after a piece of Windows desktop software that is only to be expected. If you can’t install it yourself you will have no problems finding a provider or friend who can.

1. Introduction
2. CityDesk review
3. Movable Type review
4. WordPress review
5. bBlog review
6. DasBlog review
7. CommunityServer review
8. Drupal review

For this first blog review I am looking at CityDesk. As mentioned in the introduction to this series of posts, there are certain criteria that I will be measuring each blog package against. Unfortunately for FogCreek software, CityDesk as a blog platform has a mixed bag of results.

You can read all about CityDesk at the FogCreek website. They also have a news page with RSS so you can keep up to date with developments and third party services.

Technical requirements

All it needs is a Windows box to install the software (sorry Linux/Mac fans!), somewhere to host the site and internet access. The software installs as a desktop package and the resulting blog is made up of static HTML files so any old hosting account will do.

Ease of installation

To set CityDesk up, download the setup program (a Windows .exe) from the CityDesk download page. When the file has downloaded, just double-click and you are away. That’s it. Absolutely painless. I am sure the rest of the packages in this series will not be so forgiving so top-marks so far!

Ease of use

To create my new Blog I simply choose “Create a new citydesk site” and set the location where you would like to store the files.

Once complete a fresh CityDesk site with some example files is ready and waiting to edit.

It’s all very intuitive but the interface feels a little dated and there are some strange UI decisions such as menu items that ought to be buttons but overall easy enough for anyone to use after a short period of familiarisation.

Flexibility of posting formatting

Editing pages (our blog posts) is as simple as typing in your favourite word processor but you can also edit in full html view. Everything is left up to you from design layout to content so flexibility is 100%. You can save, edit and preview in a browser. Once you are happy you can easily upload to your hosting service.

User Comments

Out of the box there is not any way your visitors can comment .. so no need for comment spam protection or moderation but seems a glaring ommission. I guess this is the downside of offline, static, blog editing. There is no intelligence in the resulting blog so any sort of interactivity is going to come from bolting on your own server-side scripting. Luckily there are free asp/php/cgi scripts out there, FogCreek would have done well to address this closer to home though.

Syndication and feeds

It’s not immediately obvious, nor easy but it is possible to syndicate your site with an RSS feed. A little poking round the website and documentation I found an KB article that tells you how to acheive this with a little help from CityDesks templating system.

Search

No search is available but this is hardly suprising as the system produces static files. You would need to use site: search at google etc. Again you are paying the price of an offline model but third party solutions will probably suffice.

Ping, Trackback and Pingback

There is nothing in the system to help you with this at all. Another problem with the package being a generic CMS and with the offline model I guess.

Categories and Tags

The only way I could see to have any sort of categorisation was to create folders for your pages and use the extra data field boxes that CityDesk provides. Displaying categories would require using a little scripting but most bloggers are not going to bother. If your blog covers a wide variety of topics then CityDesk may well not be worth the hassle but for smaller blogs this might be ok.

URLs

As you name each file as you create it the naming convention is yours so the URLs are as friendly as you make them.

Search Engine Friendliness

All the code is yours, it becomes as search engine friendly as your knowledge allows. There is certainly nothing built in that would stop it being friendly out of the box.

Template flexibility

Again, you create the templates. On the news page they list third party templates and wizards such as the collection from CityDesk Wizards. The templates are so simple any decent designer should be able to bang out something top-class without too much trouble.

Extensibility

There is a tiny scripting language, but the output is static although the articles are stored in a Microsoft Access database. Really this isn’t the software choice if a platform is what you are looking for. Most extensions to CityDesk are JavaScript and PHP bolt-ons that patch up holes in the functionality such as contact forms etc.

Ability to paste advertising code

Seeing as the package is a glorified HTML editor you can pretty much do what you like where this is concerned. Using the templates and scripting capabilities there are no real limitations to what you might want to do.

Multiple Authors and Multiple Blogs

With the paid version you can have multiple authors and as many blogs as you like. I wouldn’t say this package would be my first choice for launching a blog network but it certainly is possible to handle more than one blog and share the content creation and editing load with a colleague or two.

Developer support, ISP support and Community support

As mentioned above, there seems to be a fair little cottage industry of support for CityDesk and a discussion forum.

Technical support and documentation

There is the knowledge base, the forum and some ok help documents but to be honest, you don’t really need them. Once you make an effort to use the package it is pretty self explainatory. Problems only really come with features you expect to be there rather than using the features that are.

Cost/License

CityDesk is commercial software. Free for first 50 pages, $299 per user for Professional edition version that allows unlimited pages and Contributor Edition Starts at $297 for three users.

API, Blog by email

There is no API support but nor would you expect there to be in an offline application I guess.

Static pages/Articles

All there is is static pages and articles! How you organise your blog is completely up to you.

Type of database

CityDesk uses Access as a content database, everything is included, but the database is only used for content creation. Once the blog is published it exists as static files with no backend intelligence. From a hosting point of view it is a static site so there is no database dependency.

Stats and reporting

There is no site intelligence built in so if you want stats (and you do) then you would have to use your ISP-provided hit reports or an external tool.

Summary

Perhaps I have been unfair to poor little CityDesk in this review? In its favour it is a generic website CMS that can be used as a blogging tool. But, I have to judge it on its suitability for blogging and for this it doesn’t score brilliantly. For an amateur hobbyist blogger I would work very well but a professional needs a little more out of their software and lacking the ability to take comments out of the box is a deal-breaker for me.

1. Introduction
2. CityDesk review
3. Movable Type review
4. WordPress review
5. bBlog review
6. DasBlog review
7. CommunityServer review
8. Drupal review