This may be the wrong place for an unbiased opinion. I think there is a lot of passion for WordPress here.
Personally, I being a curious little thing, have downloaded and installed just about every CMS you can think of (and some so obscure you’ve never heard of them). I dabbled briefly in Nucleus. I found it to be uninspiring. A good yardstick by which to measure a potential CMS for your use is to do what you are doing now: hang around on the forum and support boards and get a feel for the people who are already using it. See if the boards are littered with frustrated users who get no help when they ask for it. You won’t normally find that here.
All I can say is that there was something about Nucleus that I just “didn’t like.” I didn’t like its user interface and I didn’t want to be bothered trying to create any designs for it. That may take a back seat for folks who just want to WRITE.
Sorry I can’t be more help other than to say that for blogging, I don’t think anything (not even MT in any of its iterations) can beat WordPress. It’s lean, mean, it does what you ask it, it’s based on PHP, which makes it that much more customizable if you want to sit down and learn PHP. (If you don’t, you can still come here and ask — and more likely than not, get all the help and advice you need, after which I’d advise you to hit that special someone’s paypal or amazon wishlist link in return for that precious bit of coding…)
Thread Starter
Anonymous
If you want a very basic solution, go with Nucleus. If you don’t want to install extra plugins to get basic features like trackback, comment moderation, search or calendar, stay with WordPress.
I messed around with Nucleus for a while, and I just didn’t like it. It’s a nice cms but just wasn’t for me.
Thread Starter
Anonymous
jonimueller – You make some great points, _if_ mildly biased. 😀 At this point I’d like to “dabble” in both aspects of a CMS, the design as well as the content. WordPress bothers me b/c a) you’re right, I don’t know PHP, and b) while I am pretty profitiant in CSS, WP’s template manipulates it almost _too_ much, some attributes are apparently embedded in the PHP to an extent. I know all I have to do is go and tweak specified CSS tag, but I’d be more comfortable with something like Greymatter does: you have a piece of code that represents, say, the comment link or the body of the post, and you can embed it in any styling code you want, no fuss. Again, it’s probably largely due to my lack of PHP knowledge, but I don’t like that WordPress isn’t similarly customizable. Am I just missing something? Is it really as easy as all that?
codergurl – What specifically didn’t you like about Nucleus? (I’ll give you the name’s a bit cheesy…)
Thanks, everyone, for your feedback.
You can tweak WP to be (almost) everything you like, if you are capable of PHP.
