The beauty and the beast
by nex on 2/20/03, 11:38 AM in opinionated
There's a sizeable problem with getting Antville online: it's expensive. Read on for more unjustified prejudice.
A first version of Textpattern is out. I won't download it now to play around with it because of personal reasons. I never liked PHP very much; which is, however, mostly based on prejudice and fear of the learning curve, because I never did anything with PHP. Another reason is that I like Antville and Helma and I like playing around with them and hacking them. Antville doesn't give me everything I need, but I can add missing parts.
But if I had to give objective advice to someone who wants a customisable CMS for his new blog, I guess I'd vote for Textpattern in most cases, because Antville suffers from one huge drawback: In order to get your own, customised copy online, you need a server that hosts your own custom servlet, i.e. Helma, and those are expensive, really expensive. Of course, all you'd actually need would be a host, with Helma installed, that allows you to add a hop application; but such a host doesn't exist.
For Textpattern, on the other hand, all you need is an account that processes PHP and provides a MySQL db. You can get one of these for a very little fee/ad banner in numerous places. Just FTP the PHPs up there and it works. And it looks really beautiful. It was built for editing one of the most beautiful blogs on this planet, a very readable and usable site. Of course, it would be unfair to compare this site, which is maintained by a professional typographer and respects lots of widely accepted rules of good web design, to all the ugly Antville blogs made by clueless amateurs. But this wasn't going to be a fair comparison anyway.
The situation would be totally different if Helma was as big a quasi-standard as PHP, JSP, Perl, or ASP, etc., which I would definitely like to see, but I don't think it's likely in the near future.
Another possibility, which would, however, probably cut performance down to a fraction, would be implementing Helma in Perl. Anyone interested?
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