Guus Bosman

Next week I will upgrade the operating system on the server from OpenBSD 3.5 to 3.9. The 3.5 version is two years old, and no longer supported by OpenBSD.

Even thought I am using a good OS, the chain is only a strong as its weakest link and the software I have been using the last few years, PHP Nuke, has a terrible security track record.

It's not that I have a high-profile website, but still I like to keep my website secure and I've been looking for a replacement I can use, preferably written in Java. I am using PHP Nuke, but because of the small development team the amount of new features and updates is small.

I wanted to use (server-side) Java because that's what I use in my work all the time, and I believe it's a more robust solution than PHP. I spend some time on this two years ago also.

However, I have not been able to find a tool that does the job in Java. I tend to agree with this author that (at least for personal use) PHP is the way to go for website development, compared to J2EE.

Features I need in my new front-end software:

• A large community of developers
• Regular updates
• Very active security policy (hot fixes)
• Customizable, module based
• A rich feature set: comments, content, articles, user management, link management
• If at all possible, a good image management plugin
• Nice to have: Ajax support, Blog API support, WYSIWYG editor

After long searching I decided I cannot find an appropriate Java based tool. SnipSnap doesn't have a large enough user base for me, MMBase would require too much development and Roller doesn't have nice features and only supports a simple blogging site.