Library Web Chic

Librarian in Black (Sarah Houghton) has a post pointing to a good article comparing and contrasting self-hosted blogging options. The article provides a clear and concise overview of Textpattern, Movable Type, and Wordpress. There is a good comparison chart of these different systems, as well as links to examples blogs using each of these blogging tools.

If you follow this blog at all you know that I’ve been working on implementing blogging software here at University of Houston Libraries. I also looked at these three options and had similar comments to the author of the article. It was sort of a relief to see someone else say in print that “if you need to manage multiple blogs from one place, there is no better way to go” about MovableType. In contrast, I use Wordpress for my personal blog and if I had my choice that is what I would use for UH as well. However, as the article mentions there is not multi-blog feature in the “official” distribution of Wordpress, which is why I shyed away from it for UH Libraries.

There are many other things about MovableType to like. The templates for instances are great and it is easy to compartmentalize your HTML code to make it reuseable by utilizing modules. While it is easy to edit the individual templates that are part of a theme in Wordpress, I haven’t found a way in the web interface to add new templates to a theme. I would suspect this is possible by creating the file and uploading it to the themes directory but I haven’t tried it yet. MovableType also allows you to manage the look and feel of multiple blogs easily by using “linked templates”. One area where MovableType falls down though is the creation of pages with the weblog. For example, if you wanted a contact form, list of publications etc, you would need to create a template for each of these pages. Since creating a template requires HTML skill, this creates a barrier for more novice users. This is an issues that I’m struggling with at UH Libraries as well. While most people want their blogs to be made up entirely of blog posts, some others want to add more “static” content. I’ve yet to discover an easy way for people to do this in MovableType. In Wordpress the process is extremely simple, very similar to creating a blog post, and easy for almost all users to understand. The bottom line is that no tools seems to have it all yet. So if you are choosing blogging software for your library you should download and check out all of these and any others you feel are strong candidates. Figure out which one is the best (not exact) match and go with that.