I decided last week to abandon my current blogging platform in search of greener pastures. Being a SharePoint developer, hell a SharePoint evangelist, I really thought I had to be on the SharePoint platform to make a point. Unfortunately it didn’t work out as well as I had hoped. I had upgraded my out of the box SharePoint Blog (slightly modified) to the Community Kit for SharePoint Enhanced Blog Edition ( CKS:EBE) several months back. The developers did a lot of great enhancements to the platform, it’s a huge upgrade from the standard Blog site definition and I still believe its a powerful and appropriate solution for a corporate environment and for some bloggers out there. With some more work it could be a great blogging platform but I don’t think its quite there yet.

For me though it came down the simple fact that I needed a more powerful dedicated blogging platform. The user interface is important and some post UI enhancements are really needed for the CKS:EBE but the spam is what has been a huge problem for me in the last year to the extent where I’ve had to disable trackbacks\pingbacks and turn off comments for the most part because I don’t have enough time to moderate the comments. Spending a couple hours hunting for the good comment in the endless sea of SPAM comments isn’t really an option for me. It turned my blog into a one way information source – not my goal at all. The two methods the CKS:EBE appear to use currently, CAPTCHA and Akismet - both solid solutions, never seemed to work correctly. CAPTCHA wouldn’t render in some scenarios and Akismet seemed to be ineffective or not implemented correctly for neither post comments nor trackbacks.  Now I know spam is not a problem exclusive to the CKS:EBE its a problem that every blogging platform has to deal with. Saying that other platforms seemed to have had much more success with those same tools and have brought other techniques to the battle.

After some investigation and tinkering around I decided on SubTextover  WordPress. Not really from any feature standpoint-  from what I understand WordPress may have some points over SubText. It turned out to be the underlying platform that sold me.  I’ve had enough fun on Apache while working with subversion, I don’t need any more of that kind of fun.  I really didn’t want to go down that road for my blogging platform, features be damned its just to much of a pain in the butt and out of my comfort zone for customizations. So far SubText has been a breeze to configure and customize, here is hoping the real test – it holds up to deluge of spam that will be hitting it over the next few weeks.

As for the CKS:EBE my goal isn’t to bash the project or the developers that have contributed there own time to it and I haven’t given up on it. I know there is still active development going on and being on the SharePoint platform it has HUGE amounts of potential – its just not quite there yet. I hope the CKS:EBE team continues to build and improve, I think its the best option for a SharePoint blogging platform.  If I had more time I’d work around some of the issues and maybe make some improvements but for the time being I don’t want the blogging platform to keep getting in the way of blogging! Its just not about the technology in this case, its about the message.