Geeklog vs. PHPnuke: A Brief Review

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
• 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.