Getting the Most out of Your Blog - How Many People?
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How many people will be contributing (in any way at all) to the blog? This is a very important consideration if you are using open source. Since blog engines like MT2 and Movable Type have only single user licenses for the free versions, if you want more than one user on the blog you have to buy the commercial license. Now let me say that unless you are a true Crichton (meaning you know a lot about everything), a one man blog is a bad idea. Writing, editing and programming skills are all needed to run a blog and it's not common to find ALL three skills in a single person. Most of the time writers cannot properly edit their own work, and if you are doing everything on your blog it is possible that you may not get content from varied perspectives.
I discovered that for a CMS, it is possible to make do with one technical person (programmer/coder) and one creative person (writer/editor). You could have the rest of your contributors sending in posts via email or just give them contributor access to the CMS. This all depends on the size of your blog. For example almost all Developer Shed sites are powered by content management systems. The more people you have on your blog as contributors, the bigger your blog will get. The bigger your blog gets, the more content you have, and the more relevant your site becomes on the search engines. Let's look at one word my in-house programmer never lets me forget.
Extensibility
Open source is the best form of CMS you can get, unless you have an in-house programmer and you custom build your CMS. It is not always the "best" idea to get a blog engine with the hood locked. You want your CMS extensible so that you can change things, edit modules, change functions, themes, appearances -- basically anything you want. You don't have to be the coder putting in extra wiki modules or sticking in a captcha module when spammers flood your site; you can have a contract programmer, or you could use your site admin (note that if you don't have a site admin, that may be a very big problem).
Open source CMS packages like Wordpress, Joomla and probably Phpnuke allow you to do pretty much anything you want to do. This helps when you want to add your blog to an already existing site and you need the blog to have the same look as the existing site. It also helps when you want to add totally new functions to your blog, such as wiki modules and other modules.
Extensibility is the single most important technical factor you should consider when picking a CMS. If it's not open source you need support. The next thing to consider if it is open source is the size of the supporting community. The bigger the community behind your CMS is, the less work your programmer has to do. It's silly to reinvent the wheel; all that support is free, and you get tons of plug-ins and add-ons for your blog engine. All these add to the extensibility of your blog engine.
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