http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=197267

mojotoad has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Lately I've been nosing around looking for a pure Perl CMS/BLOG. For my purposes, I'm really just interested in more of a framework for journalesque entries rather than a full blown news and commentary site.

So what is everyone's favorite (free) Perl solution, whether it be an enterprise-level CMS, mid-range BLOG, simple journal maintenance suite, or template-level publishing tool? I'm not too concerned about mod_perl usage vs CGI, but I'd like to avoid any JavaScript and overreliance on cookies.

Up with the big boys, there is of course Slashcode, Movable Type, and Bricolage. Of these, Moveable Type seems nice, but apparently is a bit happy with JavaScript and cookies. Slash, of course, is well known, but for me is a bit of overkill. I'm not too familiar with Bricolage other than knowing it's built around Mason.

On a more modest level, there's YaWPS (Yet another Web Publishing System) which seems okay though I haven't played with it to see how flexible its configuration is.

On a really basic level, I find Apache::BLOG, which basically prints one journal entry per page. Way too limited.

And of course there is rolling my own using HTML::Template or some equivalent, which is probably what I'll ultimately do since I never seem to be quite satisfied with canned solutions.

Some of the big boys, BTW, seem to be covered in the new Essential Blogging from O'Reilly; I'm not sure on what level it approaches the topic.

Thoughts, additions, reviews?

Thanks for your time,
Matt

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Pure Perl BLOG/CMS Roundup
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Sep 12, 2002 at 17:06 UTC

    On the absurdly simple side of things, Rael's Blosxom is worth considering.

      I really enjoyed using blosxom and even had an instance setup for work in our internal site. It was amazingly simple in concept and implementation. One downside was that blog entry dates were based on file timestamps, so if a published entry was ever edited, that entry would be considered the newest entry. Their site and documentation has kind of fallen into disarray as well.

      I'm rolling my own solution for personal use that has minimal dependencies and does personal journals right. It uses TT, flat files, Markdown, and unix utilities to get the job done. A perfectly glued together blog system :)

Re: Pure Perl BLOG/CMS Roundup
by dws (Chancellor) on Sep 12, 2002 at 17:39 UTC
    If you go with MoveableType, you can amaze your friends and kick sand in the face of meanies by using my Extending MoveableType to support embedded Perl hack.

    Seriously, though. MT is pretty easy to install, is usable out of the box, and lets you edit templates as well as content via the web.

    Props to btrott and his wife for a neat package.

Re: Pure Perl BLOG/CMS Roundup
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Sep 12, 2002 at 16:36 UTC
    It's a rather trivial task, actually. I found a couple simple journal/blog scripts on my venues, when I was trying to find a canned solution, but they were all of very shoddy quality/style. I too just wanted something very simple. Eventually I decided that if you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.. what I'm tossing around in my mind is a not much more than some glue for Tie::File and Template Toolkit 2, probably with a bit of FreezeThaw and pack/unpack thrown in for good measure.

    Makeshifts last the longest.

Re: Pure Perl BLOG/CMS Roundup
by hiseldl (Priest) on Sep 12, 2002 at 20:09 UTC
    Here is a short list of other blog/cms sites:

      Blogs/Journals
    • greymatter is an opensource weblogging and journal software.
    • OpenJournal from their site "Whether you call it a blog, a weblog, a diary, or a journal, the simple OpenJournal perl script will manage and maintain your Web-based musings and writings."
    • Prens@Libre is designed to publish electronic newspapers and magazines, and even utilizes some of the terminology used in the publishing industry.
    • Portals

    • WebAPP which is based on YaWPS but seems to have more activity.
    • OpenInteract is a web application environment written in perl and geared to run on the Apache web server using the mod_perl plugin module.
    • metadot's Portal Server Platform is an enterprise-wide solution based on open architecture standards.
    • Scoop engine take a look at Kuro5hin for an example (with the scoop engine link at the bottom of the page.
    • CommPort A "Community Portal" generator that can be tailored for any location.

    These are some of the better ones that I've seen, YMMV.

    Update:. added Prens@Libre.

    --
    hiseldl
    "Act better than you feel"

Re: Pure Perl BLOG/CMS Roundup
by thraxil (Prior) on Sep 12, 2002 at 19:43 UTC

    <shameless plug>

    thraxil is one that i wrote. it's intended for a collaborative weblog (eg, this site) and includes a bunch of features that may be overkill for what you're doing:

    • threaded comments
    • bookmarks
    • images
    • user accounts with individual diary areas
    • HTML::Template used for everything so it's easy to customize and supports multiple themes
    • markov chain random text generation
    • and of course it's released under the GPL

    the disadvantages at this point are that it's rather more complex than other systems, it uses a postgresql backend (should be straightforward to port to other RDBMS's, i just haven't had any motivation to do so yet) and there are some performance issues. i'm working on porting it to mod_perl and preliminary testing is showing a vast performance improvement there.

    </shameless plug>

    rolling your own isn't a bad option though. especially if your needs are different from what the standard options provide. writing a simple blog script is fun and educational.

    anders pearson

Re: Pure Perl BLOG/CMS Roundup
by valdez (Monsignor) on Sep 12, 2002 at 17:03 UTC

    There is a review of Essential Blogging on slashdot

    Ciao, Valerio

Re: Pure Perl BLOG/CMS Roundup
by mojotoad (Monsignor) on Sep 12, 2002 at 16:25 UTC
    Curse of SoPW! I inadvertently dropped a paragraph regarding our favorite Everything engine as well as Wiki solutions. Both are in the "too elaborate for my purposes" category, though I have more of a style issue with the Wiki stuff.

    I'd like to emphasise that even though something might be too robust for my purposes, I'm still interested in hearing peoples thoughts on it.

    Matt

Re: Pure Perl BLOG/CMS Roundup
by tjh (Curate) on Sep 12, 2002 at 21:30 UTC
    With all the others mentioned, it seems a shame to leave out LiveJournal.

    They offer the code under a variety of licenses (GPL primarily), and operate a commercial site hosting free and paid journals using their code as well. Apparantly it supports easy hooks for Perl extensions, is coded in Perl on MySQL.

    LiveJournal docs are here.

    I've never used it, but it appears to be supporting a large user community on their own site.

Re: Pure Perl BLOG/CMS Roundup
by mojotoad (Monsignor) on Oct 24, 2002 at 22:29 UTC
    Postscript for notational purposes.

    I just came across an interesting article "GPL Blog Engines" out on Advogato with some interesting comments and suggestions.

    Also, embedded in that article is a link to the Blog Comparison Page, which I'd never heard of before but seems to be quite informative.

    Enjoy,
    Matt

Re: Pure Perl BLOG/CMS Roundup
by cayenne (Scribe) on Sep 13, 2002 at 09:40 UTC
    Hm... which, if any, use Template::Toolkit?

    (The one that I never seem to quite get around to rolling does, but if there were another then I could use my format without having to actually write any code.)

      Hm... which, if any, use Template::Toolkit?

      Does Slash count? It supposedly uses Template::Toolkit nowadays.