Geeklog vs. PHPnuke: A Brief Review

Contributed by: FlightSimGuy on Friday, December 06 2002 @ 07:50 am EST

Last modified on

Several people here have mentioned how they tried PHPnuke, found out how much better it is, and abandoned Geeklog forever. Being curious myself, I decided to download PHPnuke and play with it and find out where they were coming from.

Here are the observations I made of how it is better/worse in comparison to GeekLog..

The Good..

  • Topics and sections are seperate entities, just like on the major weblogs[*1]
  • So easy to install, absolutely anyone could do it; the config file only has options relating to the database, and everything else is done invisibly to the user by the system
  • Pretty much everything is configurable through the web interface; no need to edit text files
  • Tons of cool modules, built-in and available with no additional downloading necessary
  • Plenty of very nice themes pre-installed, and many more available to download
  • Makes it easy to add RDF feeds..I was able to easily add feeds from my favorite geeky websites to my front page in under a minute, without having to look up their RDF URL.
  • Advertisement, forum, private message, and journal modules built-in, along with countless others
  • Actually has comment and story rating systems, even if they are broken and not configurable by the admin
The Bad..
  • That 'modules' block is just plain annoying, and the fact that its present on so many phpnuke sites reduces the respectability of yours
  • Comment rating system only worked with a select few versions of IE..it didn't work with older versions of IE and every other browser I tried
  • Downright awful security..my regular user account was allowed to rate comments as many times as I wanted, the story rating system's feature to prevent repeat voting didn't always work.
  • Confusing admin system separates admin accounts from non-admin accounts.
Clearly, phpnuke is a very nice system and a powerful rival to geeklog. Now we come to have hardest part: having seen both systems, the soon-to-be weblog admin must choose one. If I were choosing one today, and was forbidden from altering the code of either system to fix annoyances like the ones listed above, I was choose Geeklog because whatever features it has are guaranteed to work right out of the box, and especially because those security-related issues would certainly be abused by my readers to do bad stuff.

However, having the knowledge to fix the problems listed above as I do, the decision becomes much harder and I might just pick phpnuke due to its feature-packedness and the sheer number of extra goodies available.

For my own site, I've already chosen GeekLog for my site while ago, and will stand by that choice.

Comments (19)

Geeklog - Geeklog vs. PHPnuke: A Brief Review
https://www.geeklog.net/article.php/20021206075046330

[*1] http://slashdot.org