blogging tools and code quality

rayg takes a look at some of the php-based alternatives to moveable type. i have to agree with his assessment of wordpress and serendipity. the code is just messy, like most open-source php projects. my impression of textpattern was that it is even messier.

of course, this is mostly an aesthetic judgement. one thing they all have in common is good, and especially good-looking, user interfaces. i suspect that’s more important than the code quality for most bloggers.

(and to be fair, i’ve only looked at version 1.0.2 of wordpress, an older version of s9y, and an early beta of textpattern. they may have all improved.)

i’m still of the roll-my-own blogging tool mentality. it isn’t often that i miss a feature that one of the off-the-shelf packages would give me, and it’s not a large amount of code to hack on for fun. the code for the blogging bits of this site is less than 1000 lines. the code for another blog of mine is less than 100 lines, plus the 936 lines for textile. (it doesn’t supporting comments, though, and does post-by-email instead of having a web form.)