Advantages and disadvantages of coding your own blog engine versus using wordpress or similar

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Why does every man and his dog want to code a blogging engine?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of coding your own blogging engine from scratch, versus using an already existing engine (for example, but not necessarily, wordpress)?

Answer 1

I just set up my own blog and I had to answer this same question myself. Here are the main reasons I went with BlogEngine.Net

1. Coding the entire thing myself would have taken a long time
2. I saw that there were a lot of themes available (and that making/modifying themes is easy)
3. Why reinvent the wheel? (would you write something that the public engines don't already do?)

Answer 2

Advantages of writing your own

• It's fun
• You might learn new programming tricks or techniques
• Using a software you wrote is more satisfying than using someone else's
• It will be exactly as you want it

Disadvantages

• It takes time
• Security risks. A high profile open source engine such as Wordpress is less likely to have security vulnerabilities than your own, especially if you don't have experience in web development. (However there are many high profile programs full of vulnerabilities, such as the widely used Internet Explorer), so take this with a grain of salt.
• Features. Wordpress/others will probably have more features (even though some people don't like software with too many features)
• You must keep improving your engine over time. If you stop but decide to keep blogging, you will probably want to move to Wordpress, especially if some features you really want aren't implemented yet in yours. This can be problematic, especially if you didn't plan export features.

Answer 3

Actually I went through this path.

For fun and learning reasons I coded my own little content-management system which I used for rudimentary blogging. It had quite static content (no comments were allowed) but it was enough for me. One year later I decided to switch to wordpress and am really happy with it.

Today I would change my approach and would go for wordpress instantly.

Reasons from product perspective:

• You won't be able to feature-compete with wordpress (including plugins)
• You won't be able to have such a stable and secure app as wordpress
• Responsive community (both documentation and patches)
• Continous releases

Reasons from learning perspective:

• You learn a lot by understanding and reading other's source code.
• You can make the product better instead of reinventing the wheel (by providing own plugins or bug-fixes).
• It is a far more realistic job-setup: You hardly build apps from scratch but rather extend, integrate and maintain them. Also you work in a team.

Nowadays I would start to build 'from-scatch' software only if:

• There is no software which can suit you or you can't extend to your needs.
• You need a custom software for business reasons (e.g. you are a startup with fresh ideas)
• Building a new software is cheaper as maintaining/extending existing one

Answer 4

The biggest reason for going with developed blogging applications today is probably interoperability. Seasoned blogging applications of today include plug-ins and fundamental development inertia that ensures that you will interface well with things like Twitter, Flickr, and social networking sites. Only a spectacular developer (with a lot of time) would be able to custom code a solution for all the APIs and other bells and whistles that, in the course of a blog's lifetime, they will want to use or at least experiment with. To build a custom blogging application is to make its default state a basically isolated one. And isolation for many blogs doesn't work.

The biggest plus for using a custom blogging application anyway is that you retain a high degree of control over the application's core behavior, and, since you will likely host it on your own server, direct access to its statistical metrics. If you know well ahead of time that you will not care about interoperability beyond, say RSS, or one or 2 other channels, and have the time to invest in core development, a custom blog is a great way to maintain a look and feel that will positively startle visitors who are used to a constant WordPress or Blogspot layout. One major pitfall, it seems, is that off the shelf blogging applications require you to learn how to manipulate each of their various presentations. It's not hard if you want to simply adopt any thousands of "themes" that typically exist for them, but then, your presentation will not be unique. Sooner or later a visitor to your blog will encounter the same look and feel elsewhere, exactly. The solution there is to hire a custom developer but that of course costs $$$. Even if YOU are that developer who will wind up trading coding-for-core-functionality time, for learning and coding for presentational individuality. Expensive either way.

I am struggling with this question myself. As a proponent of "everything independent" on the web I hate the idea of giving up low level control of my blog. I've been online since the consumer web first took off and understand the ease by which a website can be created using nothing but notepad and an FTP client. To me, anything beyond these basic tools is very "AOLish", and yet, many blogging applications have now evolved into full content management frameworks that would rival the complexity of mastering that which it once took just to figure out basic HTML. I've finally taken to in-depth experimentation with some of the more popular blogging solutions (WordPress, Blogger), and am shocked to find out that after spending so much time maintaining my own solutions, how quickly (and much better) it is to compose and manage entries with them. Since most of my blogs are not profit projects, time to compose has not been a factor for me. However, this may change. If it comes down to where I need to manage and concern myself more with content than mechanics to get my messages out, I will probably swing to seasoned blogging app mode and hope I learn enough about my platform to make it truly a unique experience anyway. That would probably be the best outcome for anyone like us debating this.

• Dave