mendax.org

Admittedly, I’m intrigued by the buzzwords used by those describing Chyrp, who claim that it is “lightweight” and “quick” and “uncomplicated”. Chyrp is a cross between a micro-blogging platform and a normal blogging platform, yet the available plugins already offer users a substantial base of features. While Chyrp doesn’t have the large community and extendability that WordPress does, it looks as though it’s off to a good start, and my only reservation on recommending it to someone is the possibility of the author ultimately abandoning it. To curb those thoughts, however, we note that the author has been at the project since 2004, and that the code is open source.

Chyrp is also simpler than WordPress, in that the code behind it appears less complicated, or at least, smaller. Would we ever consider using Chyrp here at mendax.org? The deciding factors would be whether or not available Chyrp plugins can duplicate features we depend on, and whether or not we can find a theme that we’d be willing to go with. As our recent research has been on adapting a magazine-style theme for mendax.org, it’s unlikely that Chyrp would be refined enough before we’re ready to make a decision. Then again, perhaps a talented designer will take a look at Chyrp and decide that it’s something they just must make a refined theme for.

As would-be earlier adopters, we’re also concerned with the fact that Chyrp doesn’t appear to have Feedburner integration possibilities, as the configuration only allows one to point to Chyrp’s own RSS feed. There’s also the fact that Chyrp doesn’t seem to be built to support desktop blogging software because of the way it handles a particular file, but these are all relatively little things that could easily be addressed by Chyrp’s author.

Needless to say, Chyrp looks to have a lot of potential down the road, and we’ll be watching its continued development and community with interest.

Popularity: 7% [?]