Weblogs: Are they worth the 1s and 0s they're written with?

I'm just curious what other people think about these things.

I'm sure everyone's heard about PHPNuke, and I'm using GeekLog right now alot, but I'm sure there are tons of other ones.

Are these things worth it for a site? Does it depend on how much traffic your site gets?

What's great about these things is how incredibly dynamic everything is, but that's what hurts them, I think. There are so many queries, includes, and so much code being parsed, that this can't be good for a site with any kind of traffic, can it?

What I'm looking into doing to make them better for higher traffic sites is to include more of a "dynamic-static" content. i.e. using PHP to create static pages that are included. I think this would cut down on the number of queries, total includes, and total code length that has to be evaluated each time a user comes to the page. There are some nice things you can do with custom 404 pages to create "dynamic-static" content...

So what do you guys/gals think about these? Any discussion is welcome...this is the Lounge...

---John Holmes...

If you go to the homepage, linux.org, it doesn't look like they are using nuke or any type of weblog. The design is a copyright of they're own ...

I just think that you can have to much dynamic stuff on a page and it can really bog it down. Sure, it's great to administer and let your user choose their own font color or something, but is that all really worth it?

I think a lot of dynamic content can really be written as "dynamic-static" and there won't be a loss of much functionality.

---John Holmes...

Yeah I think your right cause I would rather take that approach too, and if this is the way to go the mod_perl systems are generally built this way. ie bricolage.

What's bricolage?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bricolage/
it is rather an application server publishing system sort of like zope but not really.

Do you know if that writes static pages for the story, or does it still pull each story out of the database?

---John Holmes...

uh! my knowledge of it is minimal but all content built with that framework is static, but them guys tell me that you can use whatever scripting inside this sytem ie PHP, to create dynamic content. truth is I have it hooked up but lost interest cause there is not much docs on this system but I think it is a powerful system but again it is hard to use. Have you had a look at midgard PHP application server I had tried it and gave up on it.

I guess I am confused by the question do you mean the logs for the site that automatically take info from access to your site..?

If so I use WebTrends Analysis Suite I like that one.. I is about a $1000 bucks though..

I guess I should of explained it more, but a Weblog is a content managment system. Examples are PHPNuke and GeekLog. They are scripts that a user can install on their server and have an "instant" site. Users can register on the site, submit stories, view calendars, etc. It's got an administration system where you can control layout, content, users, etc. It's an all-in-one package, I guess.

The problem that I see with them is that they load all of this code and make all of these database queries to create the page. Some of the bad ones will be bloated with database calls, 20+ for each page, just to create the content. There are a bunch of includes for all of the add-ons, modules, plugins, etc. Just bringing up the home page of one of these sites, you'll have a good amount of database calls, and include probably a half-dozen files...and that's for each request. I can't see how they can really hold up under any kind of load.

---John Holmes...

Ok now I got ya.. I had thought about using PHPNuke at one time even had it all setup on the server to check it out. I just like to program my own stuff. Thanks for explaining that 20+ database calls and files I do not think I would like that. Could make it really slow.. Sorry this is a little off topic..

Are you aware about greymatter

It actually does what you are referring as static-dynamic contents.

Its one of the rare package which has impressed me by its design, usability , customization and all.

You can check it on my upcomin page itself, http://jdk.phpkid.org

JD