How should a blog be structured to easily extract its data?

Question

I'm currently using Wordpress to run my website. However, with each new release I become more concerned with software bloat and the convoluted table structures used to store my data. Maybe this is a fruitless pursuit. Features are always added to blogging software until it claims to be a CMS--and at that point your data is probably stuck.

Answer 1

You do have the option of sticking with the 2.0 branch. This will be maintained with just bug fixes until 2010. Take a look at http://wordpress.org/download/legacy/

Answer 2

I also sometimes worry about the large changes WordPress undergoes.

However, since all the important data (the posts themselves and the comments) are stored in a database, it does not seem difficult to extract them in case of need (moving to a different system, or just backup). Even if the table structure gets more complex, the MySQL DB WordPress uses is easy to access and extract data from.

I'm sure that it is easy to find such extractors freely floating in the web.

Answer 3

Wordpress has an 'export' feature. It downloads most of the data such as posts, pages and comments in an XML file. These XML files can be imported into other Wordpress installations.

You can also create a simple importer to import that data else where.

Answer 4

None of the previous answers have really addressed the title of this question.

How should the tables be constructed for a blog? That entirely depends on what you want to do with it, honestly.

One approach could be to have a posts table and a comments table. The posts table could have the title, content, date, and a post id. The comments table could have a post id, comment id, commenter note, and content.

But that's really only relevant if you're building it yourself. None of the blogging tools I have ever seen are very inefficient in terms of space usage, and all of them provide import tools from "standard" formats (from blogger, wordpress, moveabletype, etc to any where else). And don't forget that they will all publish posts and comments via RSS, which makes them eminently portable.

WordPress in particular is still only 1.2 MB as a tar.gz. If that's big enough to be concerned about bloat, I'd strongly suggest building one yourself, or moving to a hosted blogging platform :)