A month or two have rolled past without a post, mostly due to pressures of work but also as a result of my wish to fix a few pieces in my Lava CMS. I had hoped that the over the last 6 months Django might have gone through version 1.0 and fixed a couple of challenges left (inheritance and search being important to me).

In the mean time I’ve picked up Groovy/Grails a lot more and like what I’m seeing there. Reading through a few tutorials for the usual “Creating a blog” with Rails/Grails/Django/Cake/etc I came across a comment about the usefulness of the tutorial (ie it wasn’t useful as a product just as a familiar learning experience).

This hit a cord with me. With working life reducing my free time to almost zero this week in particular I’ve no real desire to maintain a CMS with those precious hours remaining! As such, and as you can see, I’ve moved over to the popular Wordpress blogging platform.

Though I’d never wanted Venesi to be ‘just a blog’ Wordpress does seem to have got a number of things right, such as simplicity, flexibility and easy of templating (for the record this template is based on Metic, though has been heavily customised - I guess it doesn’t look it though!). It also allows for categories and free standing pages which effectively cover off all my requirements for a web CMS (I’m sure that through plugins even more can be achieved).

Comparing this with software like Joomla and Drupal, they feel like quite a compromised hybrid between CMS platforms and simple blogging sites. Whilst I admire both I certainly don’t want to develop web applications on top of either of them, nor are they simple enough to customise and just use, so the additional complexity and flexibility is lost on me (for this site at least).

My own visions of creating a Groovy/Grails based CMS/Blogging platform (noting that Gravl already exists for the latter) are definitely being me. I have to say that Python/Django did very well at low memory and low CPU usage - something that Groovy/Grails/JVM are certainly not tuned for at the moment (in my tests).

I will of course use Groovy/Grails, Python/Django for more interesting and creative web project, but for now I think the Internet has enough blogging and CMS platforms.