… and back to BlogCFC

While I work on giv­ing this blog back the look of the rest of my site, let me explain why I decided to switch back to the BlogCFC soft­ware and give up on BlogFusion.

First, both blog­ging apps are built with ColdFusion and that is an impor­tant rea­son I chose both of them at dif­fer­ent times. When i started this blog I was using BlogCFC from Ray Camden. At that time it was a very nice blog app and it was free but its func­tion­al­ity was a bit lim­ited. Administering it was also not so easy because there was no graph­i­cal inter­face to do so. Although my blog­ging needs were pretty sim­ple I decided to try some­thing else.

I then came across BlogFusion and although it was not free, its devel­oper had spe­cial very low pric­ing for non-​commercial blogs. It was extremely sophis­ti­cated com­pared to BlogCFC at the time and had a very exten­sive admin inter­face so I decided to switch.

As I started the task of adapt­ing the default look of BlogFusion to my site I quickly real­ized that the devel­oper had taken a very dif­feent approach to pro­gram­ming it than Ray had for BlogCF. It took me a long time to grasp how the count­less files that affected the blog’s look worked together and mod­ify them to my needs. It was a real chore and I almost went right back to BlogCFC. I really liked the new func­tion­al­ity BlogFusion was giv­ing me though. so I forged ahead and even­tu­ally got the cus­tomiza­tion done.

BlogFusion has then been picked up by new devel­op­ers and the new ver­sion has been in beta for what seems like for­ever. The beta ver­sions have looked at did not seem to have much improved the under­ly­ing mess of dis­or­ga­nized code that was behing BlogFusion 4.x and the app started giv­ing me trou­ble. In recent weeks, my host­ing provider com­mu­ni­cated with me many times to point out sev­eral errors that were occur­ing within the BlogFusion app. Between data­base con­nec­tions time­outs to other errors that were impos­si­ble for me to pin­point or fix, the host sup­port peo­ple felt that my blog was com­pro­mis­ing the sta­bil­ity of the server my Web site is hosted on so I had no choice but to do something.

Now to be fair to BlogFusion, it is entirely pos­si­ble that I messed up some­thing in it myself as I applied the var­i­ous updates from 4.0.1 to 4.0.8. I had to rely on a file com­pare util­ity (Winmerge) to apply the updates as I had heav­ily mod­i­fied sev­eral key files to get BlogFusion to look and behave like my site. As is the case with many back end devel­op­ers, the BlogFusion front end HTML/​CSS code was not very stan­dards com­pli­ant or seman­tic and relied on very out­dated markup and for­mat­ting tech­niques. I’m not a stan­dards purist by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion but it was nowhere near the qual­ity I required.

Another prob­lem I’d been hav­ing with BlogFusion from the get go is that it made it very hard to con­trol blog com­ments spam. It com­pletely ignored the blocked IP addresses list and, despite its very sophis­ti­cated admin inter­face, it was very tedious to delete spam com­ments made to sev­eral entries. There were other things as well but the point here is not to bash BlogFusion but to explain why I felt I had to switch again. BlogFusion 5 may end up to be a lot bet­ter but it will prob­a­bly end up being a lot more than I need.

In the mean­time, BlogCFC has evolved quite nicely in the last 2 years. It now offers all the func­tion­al­ity I wanted and then some and now has a very nice Web admin inter­face. The app’s under­ly­ing struc­ture is also far bet­ter orga­nized and more mod­u­lar and chang­ing the look of the app will be far eas­ier than it has been for BLogFusion. It feels good to be back to BlogCFC and I can’t wait to see what Ray has planned for it in the future.