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Giving blogs with Manila

This is part of a larger, ongoing series which examines how - in 2005 / 2006 - you can give people blogs. Visit the contents page to see the lot (or suggest more content!) or grab the feed to keep up with new stuff!

Manila

Manila and Userland software, driven by Dave Winer, were the pioneers of blogging, RSS and social software back in the day… my first blog was powered by Radio Userland and, in some significant ways, the design functionality and application of these tools is amazingly insightful.

A simple feature list of the software is enough to blow you away, not only does it give you the capacity to create multiple blogs but you also have attached a genuine content / web management system, totally flexible templating and fully functional blog tools. Add to this built in individual aggregators (something unique, still, to Manila and which could crack the market for the OS blog application that comes up with an effective use of this).

But but but but but there’s also something very very wrong. The user interface is painful, the development seems to have stalled in the last three years to almost nothing and the system seems increasingly bulky, buggy and incompatible with what we now expect from our web publishing applications. In short, it was a great idea… it’s still a great idea… but it was an average implementation which is now pretty lousy.

I have absolutely no doubt that had development really kicked on with this system it would be a world beater, but at over $1000 a pop per/annum for a non-educational licence with such attractive competition I’d now be slow to recommend it to anyone who doesn’t have a great degree of patience, fairly average expectations and is reluctant to go with an open source solution.

Shame :(

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 13th, 2005 at 3:16 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Giving blogs with Manila”

  1. Peter Baumgartner Says:
    October 11th, 2005 at 6:03 am

    I absolutely agree with you. We used for educational purposes Manial for several years. At our starting point is was much cheaper and one of the leading edge software in the field. One intriguing feature for us was the combination of an traditional CMS with Blog features and the possibility to create on one server multi-blogs/multi-websites.

    But Manila lost ground over the years and is on the features list so god any more. The interface was and is horrible. Many bug in the Frontier kernel, absolutely no response after reporting bugs and a strong insensibility against localization (Umlaute and other special characters) made it a cumbersome experience. We changed this summer (much to late!) to open source Zope/Plone (because of our double needs of CMS und Weblog) and are very happy with it.

  2. Blogsavvy: Professional Blog Consultant - Consulting for blogging in business, education, the community, activism and for money Says:
    October 24th, 2005 at 1:58 pm

    […] 1. Movable Type 2. Manila […]