Mango Blog Madness

Posted By: Mark Aplet 2 Comments May 22, 2008

I just wanted to post today surrounding my thoughts on Mango Blog. I am both excited and upset with the solution so far. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Mango Blog, It's a free open source coldfusion blog application that has just recently made it to it's 1.0 release. It's great that it has features not seen in other CF blogging software and the attention to details within the admin are leaps and bounds above the competition. In my opinion BlogFusion has been the only solution to come close in terms of look and feel of the application, and the features. BlogFusion unfortunately was built around the use of tables for almost all of it modules. I spent many hours reworking the modules for that app only to ditch it in favor of Mango.

I think mango blog will be the next wordpress for coldfusion as long as Laura (author of mango blog) continues to chug away at it's code. It has some really great features that even wordpress would be tickled to have. Things like skinning, themes, plugins, and the file manager.

Speaking to skinning this is both my love and hate for mango. I like how easy it is to just drop in features or widgets. What drives me nuts is the lack of documentation. There is no central PDF to download that has at least of available tags for things like, comments, posts, and search. Currently documentation is a few unorganized pages on the mangoblog website. So right now the only option is to wade through the example skins digging and searching for what you need.

Mango is only a 1.0 release as of writing this, and I am sure the docs will come. Sounds like Laura is up late working on the source code and answering forum posts which I think is almost a better source for documentation. At least you can search the forums :) To say the least, I am anxious for docs.

So what is mango? Well the blog your reading now is in mango. Curently the skin is a pre-packaged theme. I am plugging away at my own but it's a slow process and think it will take another week or more to have something basic done. crossing my fingers for a swifter solution.

Tags: Mango Blog

2 comments so far ↓

  • 1 Dan // Jun 30, 2008 at 4:53 PM
    What do you think of the speed of the application? It seems to be a pretty nifty blog program, but it seems a tad bit slow for me so far. I dunno if that's just my server or not. The themes look GREAT! and the feature set is pretty nice so far. :-)
  • 2 Mark Aplet // Jun 30, 2008 at 5:31 PM
    I have it installed on three machines, none of which are all that new. They are around 1.5 GHz with about 1 GB RAM. One machine has XP pro with IIS, the second is a 2003 Web Edition. and my big gun VPS is a 2 GHz Intel with 1GB RAM. From time to time, the app hangs on updating or creating a new post. If this happens, I stop the browser and try again. It is not double posting so it's not hanging later in the process, but only at first. It's not a huge issue for me. If it were, I may use something else. On my machines BlogCFC ran slower than mango so it could be an individual configuration. It seams to run better on an Intel machine under CF7 than the other two with CF8. So far, mango is the best option that I have seen for the less techie users. It has the best interface, and is the easiest to set up. In time mango will get more plugins and speedier so until I want to cross to the dark side and use Wordpress or Drupal it's the best thing available for blogging software.

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