Nee help to choose blog addon

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Hello people.

My clients want a blog/news section on their website. I was looking at the wordpress addon, and then came across ProBlog/SimpleBlog. Does anyone have experience with both? pros and cons?

It seems a good idea to have a separate WordPress blog and insert it into the concrete5 site, but that may only be a good idea if you already have a WordPress blog up and running. How is ProBlog to work with/install?

The clients does not have any blogging experience, just thought it would be a good idea since they can update with info and stories interesting to the customers (they have a wildlife camp in Serengeti)

Also, at the front page, I want to have three columns at the bottom linking to articles of interest to the visitore. These links will not be "read the latest article from the blog", but rather fixed linkt to specific articles (hope you understand what I mean). is this easy to do in both blog addons?

Thank you from me, and thanks for a great forum. Concrete5 rules

djoniba
 
madeforspace replied on at Permalink Reply
madeforspace
Hi djoniba

I have used both Pro blog and simple blog and both are great products.
I now use Pro as it does everything I need and more.
It is totally customisable and flexible and will do what you asked and the developer is a C5 old hand (in a nice way Chad) and provides good support for his products.
You can of course add a Wordpress (sorry I swore) into your C5 install but the question is why would you want to if the blog does not exist yet? There may be some stuff that WP does that C5 does not but I don't know what they are.

Hope that helps.

p.s. No I dont work for Chad I just like his products :)
djoniba replied on at Permalink Reply
djoniba
Thanks. I thought that would be the answer :)
RadiantWeb replied on at Permalink Reply
RadiantWeb
thanks for the kudos mfs! appreciated.

@djoniba

The decision is really up to how savvy your client is. If they get confused real easy with things...go with ProBlog. You can't mess it up.

Some people like that SimpleBlog integrates with the Composer tool, and their clients like going to one "central" place for all publishing. SimpleBlog comes with a lot of good tools taken directly from ProBlog, and is easily migratable to ProBlog.

Franz, the CEO of C5, would likely tell you to use Wordpress as he has done so in the past. I personally don't feel this is good thinking. for a number a reasons:

1 - C5 has a very solid base framework, and is very extendable.
2 - building with C5 is so much more flexible, and you can have everything in one site, cleanly done.
3 - you can have multiple blogs on your site with ease.

This past year I have put a LOT of energy into buffing ProBLog. It now has Pingback scraping and integrated twitter posting, as well as built in Disqus integration. It's well supported, and I have yet to have any customer come back and complain that ProBlog is "lacking" a feature they mis from Wordpress.

Don't get me wrong, it's not perfect and I have lots of improvements on the dev list for it. But it's a great app well worth the $35. And it will continue to get better and better.

Hope this helps.

ChadStrat
djoniba replied on at Permalink Reply
djoniba
Sounds great. I just bought the SimpleBlog. Is it much easier for the user to use ProBlog? And is it easier to style? If yes to both questions, I think I will upgrade to ProBlog. Do I have to pay full price, or is there an upgradeprice?