[LRUG] which blog and which BB?

[Tom Armitage]

On 2/20/2008, "Pierre Nel" <pierre.nel at gmail.com> wrote:

>Isn't it weird that there aren't any glaringly obvious solutions - ie
>install x if you want a forum, or y if you want a gallery, for rails?
>
>Why is that, other than PHP being around longer?
>
>Just curious :-)

Deployment.

Or, to expand: most people who would _choose_ a Rails solution over a PHP
solution are the kind of people who are confident enough at their
ability to _write_ a Rails solution. Because, you know, they've got a
VPS and know their way around a Mongrel config. Even the more
user-friendly install processes in Rails still require a lot of fiddling.

Most PHP forums/blog-software/similar is not used by PHP programmers.
It's used by people who want a free solution they can FTP onto a web
server and _just work_. The ease of deployment - if you can use a
web-admin panel to make a database and an FTP client - opens up PHP apps
to way more people.

So: why make apps for people who'll make their own? I'm currently
writing a piece of forum software, to be open-sourced, but right now,
I'm focusing on making it work for me. One of the big post-launch
things to improve is the set-up process - ideally, you want to put it on
a server, configure a mongrel, and run a rake:setup task to seed the
database.

But that's never going to be as easy as the "drag-and-drop" that PHP
promotes. And why would you pick the hassle of a Rails app over a PHP
app that does the same thing? Hence why my blog uses Wordpress, and why
I've gone to reasonable lengths to script, template, and hack it to
work how I want - because, with a reasonable templating language and
plugin architecutre (which Wordpress _almost_ has), I can do what I want
with minimum fuss. And when there's a security update... it's usually
just drag-and-drop.

"Rails" isn't a reason to choose a forum app; functionality and
suitability for use (both by people, and within the environment you
already have) are. As a result: it's going to be a _special_ forum app
that forces people into Rails.

(My forum app will not be that. It's definitely special, but mainly
because it has a very unusual set of functionality, rather than any
defined brilliance. If you want the functionality it offers... there's
almost nothing else that does...)