Now Mango Powered

April 8, 2008 · 13 Comments

I had been having some difficulties with MachBlog. Not that it's a bad piece of software, it was just giving me more headaches than it was helping to solve. So I went looking for a new piece of blog software. I originally had thought to go WordPress, but it's restriction to MySQL didn't work for me. I thought about going back to BlogCFC, but didn't really want to go back to that for a variety of reasons. I finally decided on MangoBlog, from our good friends over at ASFusion. I like the look and feel and I love the setup process. It works great and should be pretty simple to upgrade, if I follow the directions.

If you previously had a subscription, you should be OK. RSS should stay the same as well.

Now Mango Powered

Tags: General

13 responses so far ↓

1 Sami Hoda // Apr 8, 2008 at 6:47 PM

Can you talk about the issues you were having? I'm having to make the same decision you are.
2 Andrew Powell // Apr 8, 2008 at 6:53 PM

@Sami :: Admittedly, I was running on an older beta version, but everytime I tried to upgrade to the release version, it went less than smoothly. That being said a lot of my issues may have been beta-based. The site would throw errors all over the place all day, every day. Also, it would not recognize correct captcha entries, but still generate an email for a topic reply. I know Matt has done a great job on it, but he's swamped and doesn't have a lot of time to devote to MachBlog's upkeep. It's just a fact of life.
3 Matt Woodward // Apr 8, 2008 at 7:59 PM

Hey Andrew--sorry to see you go ;-), but I know Mango's a great blog package as well. We are working on MachBlog 2.0 (and yes, I have help now) quite a bit so if you have a few minutes to just email me some of the headaches you had, errors you saw, etc. I'd love to roll that into the to-do list for 2.0. Thanks.
4 Laura Arguello // Apr 8, 2008 at 11:19 PM

Hi Andrew, I hope you enjoy Mango! @Matt: We can still be friends :-)
5 Ed // Apr 10, 2008 at 3:35 PM

Did you consider and try 1ssBlog? Just interested to know if there was any issues with it or there was something that you need but could not found.
6 Andrew Powell // Apr 10, 2008 at 4:48 PM

Didn't even consider 1ssBlog. It was WordPress, Mango, & BlogCFC.
7 Dan Vega // Apr 10, 2008 at 5:45 PM

I really like the header graphic you came up with!
8 Charlie Arehart // Apr 11, 2008 at 12:01 PM

So Andy, you mention that subscriptions and RSS feeds should remain ok, but what about links to old entries from when you were on Mach Blog. I'm sure a lot of bloggers would consider switching blogs but are fearful that old links (whether on the sites of others, in search engines, or just in their own other entries) would now all be broken. Did Mango help you in some way with this? Or were you fortunate in some choice of how you'd configured Mach blog to make it work well? I just bring this up for others to consider if they get excited about the prospect. Mango does get high praises. Laura, since you're here, is this perhaps an issue you discuss either in your docs or on your site? Feel free to point us there for more on this. PS And Laura (and Andy), there's a bit of a bug (at least in the version of Mango that Andy's running). When one tabs out of this comment area, it skips to the "submitcomment" button rather than to the "subscribe to this comment thread" and captcha fields as would be expected. I just checked, and it's that there's no tabindex values on the latter two fields. Also, if one makes any mistake in the form, when it reloads, it doesn't remember the choices made for those two fields and "remember my info".
9 Andrew Powell // Apr 11, 2008 at 12:10 PM

@charlie - I left the MachBlog install in place so that links wouldn't die. I just put a handler in the index.cfm file to direct anything that doesn't have an "event" over here. I did that b/c just what you're talking about really hurt me when I switched the first time from BlogCFC. You'll notice that this runs in /blog instead of the webroot.
10 Laura Arguello // Apr 11, 2008 at 5:04 PM

@Charlie: URL changes are a problem we all face, and a topic for a much larger discussion. That's why I love URL rewriting and friendly urls, it makes migrations and changes much easier. To answer your question, no, I don't address that particular issue anywhere, mostly because there could be many different urls people have been using that I cannot possibly anticipate. However, it would be a good idea to at least give suggestions regarding how to solve it (hint taken!). If Andy helps :), I would be willing to create a plugin that would redirect or directly show the old post that went to an old url (as long as there is a way to match the old id to the new one, if it has changed). It could be a model for solving other people's particular needs. Regarding the tab index problem, I posted an update that fixes that plus other things I noticed. I actually didn't create this skin, so I didn't want have to support it, but since it is for download with the other skins, I think it should work perfectly nevertheless.
11 Andrew Powell // Apr 14, 2008 at 8:08 AM

I guess this depends on a lot of things. You have to be using UUIDs for both systems. You need to have a way to persist the existing system so you can reference the current posts, otherwise, you need a translation system for the friendly URLs. It's a lot more complex problem than it initially appears to be.
12 Mike // Jun 4, 2008 at 9:11 PM

Did you save your scripts from the machblog transfer? I was thinking of switch also.
13 Video Infographics // Jan 7, 2011 at 12:51 PM

I did that b/c just what you're talking about really hurt me when I switched the first time from BlogCFC. You'll notice that this runs in /blog instead of the webroot.

Andrew Powell

Into The Mind of A Solutions Architect