An N2 CMS

As I wrote about earlier this week, we’ll be “forced” to move our company and personal blogs off of the Blogger platform come the end of March this year.  All opinion on the matter aside, we decided this was a great opportunity to test ourselves with N2F Yverdon.

Going in line with that idea, we sat down to catalog the features we needed to replicate from Blogger and WordPress to make the CMS useful to us across multiple instances.  Here is that list:

• Support for Windows Live Writer and other desktop publishing clients (Atom Publishing Protocol, MetaWeblogAPI, MovableType or Really Simple Discovery)
• Multiple authors with profiles for each
• Entry trackback links
• Comment moderation and spam protection
• Image upload integration with RTE
• Pings to services like weblogs.com
• Atom/RSS Feeds
• Code Syntax Highlighting
• Memcached compatibility

The list we have going is a bit longer, but mostly due to it digging down deeper with each of the above features and listing most of the common features you could expect in any useful blogging application.

You may notice that there is no mention of plug-ins.  Keep in mind that for the moment we’re building a system mostly for internal use.  N2F Yverdon is already so easily extensible we basically have a plug-in system already built.  We will be releasing the application somewhere (likely on the N2F site) under the same MS-RL license used for N2F Yverdon.  If any of you would be interested in helping us build a good plug-in system, we’re all ears.

That’s all for this announcement.  It’s looking like we’ll be putting down code as early as next week, which is good if we intend to have this ready for use by the end of March!  More updates to come as they’re available.

 

- Andy

The End of Blogger (At Least For Me)

For the past few years, I’ve been using Blogger as the service powering my blog (and recently it was chosen to power the blog for the company).  It made things pretty easy for me, as all I needed to do was open up an FTP account to the service and let it rip.  Google had announced a while ago that they were phasing out the FTP feature for Blogger.  Since I try pretty hard to ignore Google, I missed this notice.  They were kind enough to send me a reminder email of sorts yesterday, letting me know that sometime in March this year, the FTP feature would be discontinued completely.

In some ways, this is a sad moment for me.  I have enjoyed the service, mostly because of how easy it was to use.  In other ways, this presents itself as an opportunity.  I have no intention of allowing Google to hold onto anymore of my data than they already do, so the thought of switching to a custom domain is just unacceptable.  I’m left with two choices as I see things:

1. Install WordPress/Drupal/etc to replace Blogger
2. Create a new CMS/Blog, because the world doesn’t already have enough of these

It’s true, the world probably doesn’t have enough.  A Bing search for ‘free Blog engine’ turns out approximately 17.5 million results, which essentially means nothing.  There are a ton of good-enough solutions out there which I could easily utilize to take care of the switch.  Unfortunately for me, I am – by default – required to be an annoying advocate for my open source framework, the N2 Framework.  We love our little framework so much, we’d rather spend time reinventing the blogging wheel and show it can be done.

So it seems that is what I’ll be doing over the next month or two.  I might be able to rope one or two of the other N2F developers into helping, but I don’t have more than a few extra hours each week that I can devote to the project.  I’ll do what I can to outline our progress here and on the N2F site.  Our goal will be to simply replicate all of the features we have available for us with the Blogger service.  I’ve got two months, here’s hoping this framework works as well as we need!

 

- Andy