[ACFUG Discuss] ColdFusion vs WordPress
I know the subject is comparing apples and oranges, but I'm caught with a difficult question. I have a Creative Director who has learned and loves utilizing WordPress for his own side purposes. He wants to know if that is something we can now roll out for a client to build a website that acts essentially as an interactive newsletter. (I've already discussed with him that he needs to define 'interactive' and discuss 'measurable goals' with the client to prove we have indeed been 'interactive') The reasons he loves WordPress and wants to go with it are: - Easy to use - Searchable (vs flash-based page turner they currently use) - It will be faster to deploy having graphics, writing and copy editing teams working simultaneously on articles - He comes pre-trained and there are lots of tutorials on-line - There are constant updates, plug-ins, themes and extensions being built everyday that he can use With a small team of developers I am hesitant to add yet another platform for us to support, and worse yet another language, PHP. Reasons 1-3 are essentially things that can be solved by most CMS systems (ie Mura, or BoomSocket - which is what we currently use) and even MangoBlog and possibly BlogCFC. Reasons 4-5 are big question marks in my mind though. The CF community has nowhere near the presence of the PHP or even WordPress community. There are a ton of tutorials, videos, plug-ins, updates, themes and even user groups as well. ColdFusion certainly has its place as a middleware hub for all sorts of things. Today, I'm wondering with our growing deficit of tools, platforms and developers if we are losing our place among web platform utilities. The open source community is rapidly out pacing CF with platforms like WordPress, Ning (which I utilize tons on the side without really knowing PHP well), Drupal and others. I'm searching in my head for valid reasons that we would not want to roll-out WordPress because we are a CF shop. Still, I can't shake the truth of the matter being that in addressing the massive amounts of help tutorial/trainings and plug-ins, themes and extensions out there why I wouldn't launch a WordPress site on a 3rd party hosted solution and let our design teams maintain it most of the way. How would you set up a small content-managed site for a group of writers and designers to have the most flexibility while utilizing less of your time? (WordPress, Mura, BoomSocket, Drupal, Ning, MangoBlog, other). If CF can't compete in this area, which seems to depend upon sheer numbers of developers using the language, should it try to catch up and how or should it just give up the game in competing for web-based platform/tool offerings with healthy ecosystems of plugins like WordPress and keep focusing itself down to a middleware language to be carried by other intriguing Adobe specific options like Flash/Flex/AIR/Reader? There's a Monday loaded question of the day. -- Cheyenne Throckmorton - Atlanta, GA Blog : www.CheyenneJack.com Twitter : @cheyennejack Founder : www.AtlantaUserGroups.com www.TheTallStreetJournal.com www.MohawksRock.com
Re: [ACFUG Discuss] ColdFusion vs WordPress
Typically, I'm seeing many people using wordpress who rarely go into the code. So a big part of this will be how much customization is he wanting to add. Mura and MangoBlog are solid CF alternatives and staying within the language will help your team out. They also have active development communities like Wordpress which I think is very important. BoomSocket never really took off so I would be careful there (sorry Eric). Wordpress is a gold standard so using it isn't necessarily a bad thing. If he wants to customize a lot to it, I would steer towards Mura/Mango so you can keep up with his requests. John ma...@fusionlink.com Cheyenne Throckmorton wrote: I know the subject is comparing apples and oranges, but I'm caught with a difficult question. I have a Creative Director who has learned and loves utilizing WordPress for his own side purposes. He wants to know if that is something we can now roll out for a client to build a website that acts essentially as an interactive newsletter. (I've already discussed with him that he needs to define 'interactive' and discuss 'measurable goals' with the client to prove we have indeed been 'interactive') The reasons he loves WordPress and wants to go with it are: - Easy to use - Searchable (vs flash-based page turner they currently use) - It will be faster to deploy having graphics, writing and copy editing teams working simultaneously on articles - He comes pre-trained and there are lots of tutorials on-line - There are constant updates, plug-ins, themes and extensions being built everyday that he can use With a small team of developers I am hesitant to add yet another platform for us to support, and worse yet another language, PHP. Reasons 1-3 are essentially things that can be solved by most CMS systems (ie Mura, or BoomSocket - which is what we currently use) and even MangoBlog and possibly BlogCFC. Reasons 4-5 are big question marks in my mind though. The CF community has nowhere near the presence of the PHP or even WordPress community. There are a ton of tutorials, videos, plug-ins, updates, themes and even user groups as well. ColdFusion certainly has its place as a middleware hub for all sorts of things. Today, I'm wondering with our growing deficit of tools, platforms and developers if we are losing our place among web platform utilities. The open source community is rapidly out pacing CF with platforms like WordPress, Ning (which I utilize tons on the side without really knowing PHP well), Drupal and others. I'm searching in my head for valid reasons that we would not want to roll-out WordPress because we are a CF shop. Still, I can't shake the truth of the matter being that in addressing the massive amounts of help tutorial/trainings and plug-ins, themes and extensions out there why I wouldn't launch a WordPress site on a 3rd party hosted solution and let our design teams maintain it most of the way. How would you set up a small content-managed site for a group of writers and designers to have the most flexibility while utilizing less of your time? (WordPress, Mura, BoomSocket, Drupal, Ning, MangoBlog, other). If CF can't compete in this area, which seems to depend upon sheer numbers of developers using the language, should it try to catch up and how or should it just give up the game in competing for web-based platform/tool offerings with healthy ecosystems of plugins like WordPress and keep focusing itself down to a middleware language to be carried by other intriguing Adobe specific options like Flash/Flex/AIR/Reader? There's a Monday loaded question of the day. - To unsubscribe from this list, manage your profile @ http://www.acfug.org?fa=login.edituserform For more info, see http://www.acfug.org/mailinglists Archive @ http://www.mail-archive.com/discussion%40acfug.org/ List hosted by http://www.fusionlink.com -
Re: [ACFUG Discuss] ColdFusion vs WordPress
There's no ready-made alternative to Wordpress or Drupal in the CF world. The Mango Blog engine has the capabililty for feature extension very easily. I've written a couple of simple plugins and themes, it's fairly easyu. There are a growing number of people contributing themes and plugins to the Mango community but it's several years behind the curve when compared to WP. The potential is there but it will take a while to realize. If you need to stick with a CF solution, I'd look at that first. I've no experience with Mura. It could very well be that he's enchanted by the possibilities in the WP universe that he won't ever use and that once he defines some real requirements Mango would work just fine. Alternately, at the peril of introducing supporting a PHP application, WP is a breeze to support. Seriously. It's by far one of the more polished open source apps that exist. You can run into problems if you want to start some hardcore customizations, but if his requirements call for that, stick with a CF solution. I have found BlogCFC customizations difficult at best for anything that's not the simplest request. It's not the initial customization that has bit me but the subsequent upgrades. I haven't looked a the BlogCFC 6 alphas in some time but I don't recall seeing anything that looked like it would be a great deal easier in the future. I felt a bit like a traitor doing it but I recently converted the handful of blogs I maintain to WP from Mango/BlogCFC. I was just tired of continually putting off my to do list of features for the blogs because there wasn't a plugin to handle it yet and I don't have enough time right now to develop them in time for when I wanted them. -- Howard Fore, howard.f...@hofo.com The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. ... No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. - Richard P. Feynman On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Cheyenne Throckmorton cheyenne.throckmor...@gmail.com wrote: I know the subject is comparing apples and oranges, but I'm caught with a difficult question. I have a Creative Director who has learned and loves utilizing WordPress for his own side purposes. He wants to know if that is something we can now roll out for a client to build a website that acts essentially as an interactive newsletter. (I've already discussed with him that he needs to define 'interactive' and discuss 'measurable goals' with the client to prove we have indeed been 'interactive') The reasons he loves WordPress and wants to go with it are: - Easy to use - Searchable (vs flash-based page turner they currently use) - It will be faster to deploy having graphics, writing and copy editing teams working simultaneously on articles - He comes pre-trained and there are lots of tutorials on-line - There are constant updates, plug-ins, themes and extensions being built everyday that he can use With a small team of developers I am hesitant to add yet another platform for us to support, and worse yet another language, PHP. Reasons 1-3 are essentially things that can be solved by most CMS systems (ie Mura, or BoomSocket - which is what we currently use) and even MangoBlog and possibly BlogCFC. Reasons 4-5 are big question marks in my mind though. The CF community has nowhere near the presence of the PHP or even WordPress community. There are a ton of tutorials, videos, plug-ins, updates, themes and even user groups as well. ColdFusion certainly has its place as a middleware hub for all sorts of things. Today, I'm wondering with our growing deficit of tools, platforms and developers if we are losing our place among web platform utilities. The open source community is rapidly out pacing CF with platforms like WordPress, Ning (which I utilize tons on the side without really knowing PHP well), Drupal and others. I'm searching in my head for valid reasons that we would not want to roll-out WordPress because we are a CF shop. Still, I can't shake the truth of the matter being that in addressing the massive amounts of help tutorial/trainings and plug-ins, themes and extensions out there why I wouldn't launch a WordPress site on a 3rd party hosted solution and let our design teams maintain it most of the way. How would you set up a small content-managed site for a group of writers and designers to have the most flexibility while utilizing less of your time? (WordPress, Mura, BoomSocket, Drupal, Ning, MangoBlog, other). If CF can't compete in this area, which seems to depend upon sheer numbers of developers using the language, should it try to catch up and how or should it just give up the game in competing for web-based platform/tool offerings with healthy ecosystems of plugins like WordPress and keep focusing itself down to a middleware language to be carried by other intriguing Adobe specific options like Flash/Flex/AIR/Reader?
