Mango Blog Test Drive

Last night I downloaded Mango Blog and did a local install to take it for a test drive. I've been using BlogCFC since I started this blog and it has served me well so far, but the Mango Blog interface is just so much better.

It's like Wordpress only better!

Ok so perhaps not exactly better than Wordpress, but I have installed Wordpress, and I can say in all honesty that it's not "that" far off, and besides it's written in CFML which is way better than PHP!

Works with Railo

So remember when I said that its like Wordpress? Well Mango is also free, and Railo is also free.

Skinnable

I have to say I am really quite impressed with how easy it is to skin, the design on my site is quite simple and based on one of the available Mango Skins, so it was a snap to get my site up and running with my own look'n feel.

Some efficiency improvements to the skin are needed though as the full view of an entry looks the same as the pages as index page. So I see no need to make the same changes to the header in all the skin files, I just cut that bit of code out and include it.

Administration is Clean

Don't get me wrong the Admin in BlogCFC is also clean and simple, its just not pretty and well the built in Rich Text Area (RTE) is a nice addition, meaning I didn't have to add it myself :).

Plugins

There are a nice number of useful plugins available and naturally you can always build your own.

More is missing

The one thing that is missing in Mango is the <more> tag that is in BlogCFC, mango uses an extra "Excerpt" text field instead, but I guess I could write a plugin that would allow me to continue using the more tag. Or perhaps someone is already writing one.

Convert?

I haven't made up my mind yet, I need to play around a little bit more with it before I decide whether to convert to Mango or not. But it's a really great Blog and Mini CMS.