minning.de - Stefan Minning: CG Artist and Developer

When I first began cre­at­ing the web­site for minning.de in 2001, I was work­ing for a small web design com­pany as a code mon­key pro­duc­ing PHP scripts. Nat­u­rally, I wanted to employ all that nifty cod­ing for my per­sonal site as well, so the site started out on a cus­tom con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem dubbed Mirai. Mirai was PHP and XML-​​based, cludgy, and didn’t scale very well. Still it was pretty lean and didn’t suf­fer from any kind of bloat, as it was custom-​​tailored to my per­sonal needs.

These days, I don’t have the moti­va­tion to write a cus­tom CMS for my lit­tle per­sonal port­fo­lio web­site, which is the rea­son why I am cur­rently using Word­Press. How­ever I always like to play with new toys; since I’m already plan­ning a new design for the site, I’m cur­rently eval­u­at­ing sev­eral dif­fer­ent open source alter­na­tives to power minning.de.
Most of those trendy blog­ging and com­plex CMS fea­tures I couldn’t care less about. What I want is a sim­ple sys­tem that lets me post notes to my jour­nal, present my port­fo­lio in an aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing fash­ion and stays out of my way the rest of the time. Few things irri­tate me more than soft­ware that’s in your face. Espe­cially the hip AJAXy kind…

Drupal

For my com­pany web­site The Plau­si­ble Impos­si­ble I chose to use Dru­pal. This sys­tem, while a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing at first, is quite flex­i­ble and offers a plethora of mod­ules for any con­ceiv­able pur­pose. The main things I dis­like about Dru­pal are that it doesn’t offer a totally sep­a­rate Admin area and that most of its fea­tures are geared towards a multi-​​user envi­ron­ment. I can see how that might be use­ful for large com­mu­nity dri­ven sites, but for a per­sonal port­fo­lio web­site like mine it’s just overkill.
The Acid­free media man­age­ment sys­tem was eas­ily the best solu­tion I found for a gallery, though. It’s sim­ple and doesn’t make any pre­sump­tions as to the look of your gallery. Def­i­nitely a plus!

Joomla/Mambo

Stu­pid name jokes aside, my test of Joomla didn’t last very long. The default Admin area’s style reminded me way too much of the abom­i­na­tion that is the Win­dows Luna theme, com­plete with cutesy candy coated icons and col­or­ful text. Don’t get me wrong, I do like col­ors — but in a user inter­face I pre­fer sooth­ing greys and other non-​​intrusive colors…

TextPattern

The install was sim­ple enough and the sim­plic­ity of the default admin­is­tra­tion area is a joy to behold, at least com­pared to the ugli­ness of the afore­men­tioned Joomla.
The Textpat­tern web site itself is well designed and they seem to have a pretty active user com­mu­nity. In terms of fea­tures it appears to have every­thing I need, expect for a decent gallery sys­tem.

WordPress

Word­Press is prob­a­bly the most sim­ple to use of the scripts I tested — then again, it’s not a full fea­tured CMS but just a blog­ging sys­tem with some extras that can be “mis­used” in a CMS-​​like man­ner.
But that sim­plic­ity is what I most enjoy about it… strip­ping out fea­tures such as the cal­en­dar or the ridicu­lous META area in the theme is sim­ple enough and adding fea­tures is even eas­ier through their clever plug-​​in sys­tem. The admin area is neat and well orga­nized.
Not much to dis­like here, and con­sid­er­ing that the site is already run­ning on Word­Press 2 right now, I might as well just stick with it — unless I find some­thing much bet­ter very soon.

Unfor­tu­nately, all the gallery sys­tems I tried were either too com­plex or oth­er­wise not quite what I was look­ing for. The gallery is how­ever the main rea­son this web­site exists, so I will need to come up with a cus­tom solu­tion, no mat­ter which CMS I choose even­tu­ally. Sys­tems like Cop­per­mine or Gallery 2 are huge and have more fea­tures than I’d ever use, so they are out of the question.