43|GreyMatter: Beware! Antiquated Blogware.
March 22nd, 2006 by Marcel Ursprung
http://www.noahgrey.com/greysoft
Noah Grey developed and maintained GreyMatter until late 2002. The project was then handed down to it’s open source community. The forum was maintained by Richard Foshee (AKA FoshDawg) for some time, and later by Rob Arnold (AKA Linear) who announced on greymatterforums.com:
“I think GM is basically doomed, for the reasons listed above. After we get the current list of known bugs sorted out in a release, I don’t really have much interest in continuing to maintain it.”
The forum and it’s dedicated user community has kept GreyMatter alive with new hacks and mods to extend the stressed platform. Since 2004 all development has stopped on the project.
For it’s time GreyMatter had a myriad of features including:
- GreyMatter-Style (a proprietary text input style, since popularized and copied by other blogware)
- Comments
- Search
- File uploading
- Image manager (photo-blogs)
- Multiple authors
- User access permissions
- Customizable templates
- Calendar
- IE bookmarklet
- Karma voting (reviews)
- IP blacklist
- Activity log (with hack alert)
- Multilingual support (see languages)
Plugins have further extended the base feature set with modern must haves such as; categories, RSS feeds, trackbacks, post from email, and a spell checker, just to name a few. However still missing from the mix are blogrolls, a links manager, WYSIWYG editor, and an easy install process for beginners.
The install process requires some server knowledge (most likely Unix), including proper setup of the cgi scripts, file permissions, and file paths. It is not something to be attempted by the novice user. To make matters worse, GreyMatter only handles one blog, each additional blog requires it’s own installation. An excerpt from businessblogconsulting.com:
“On a scale of 1-10, 10 being the Geekiest of Geeks, I rate GreyMatter a 7 on the difficulty level. There is difficulty in its installation, and further difficulty if you are an HTML novice in dealing with its vast array of templates. Once you’ve mastered both, however, you will find GreyMatter very powerful.”
Being a PERL based platform, with static pages, means it requires rebuilds of the archives when you make significant changes to the templates. This process can put a big load on the server often leaving small web hosts “Kaput“.
The best advice is to look somewhere else for your blogging needs. Many former aficionados of GreyMatter have since switched to WordPress or Textpattern for their own blogs.
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8 Responses to 'GreyMatter: Beware! Antiquated Blogware.'
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nice work.
Where is your next post? I am waiting with anticipation
Just to amplify the quote from me above, it’s not doomed just because I have no further interest in maintaining it. The big problem is that it was not written to be maintainable. Fixing it for real looks like ground-up rewriting it, and why not just put the effort into improving some other tool that already works well?
Nice roundup though, and I do completely agree with the article premise.
Hi marketing friends,
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Look at what Stephen Pierce has arranged for you.
http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?af=616328
It’s worth noting that several of the GM “power users” have taken up the challenge of maintaining GreyMatter - including the “core changes” required. It’s up to Version 1.7.4, and about to roll to 1.8. Look here for details –> http://greymatterforum.proboards82.com/
Huh, sad article, not very well informed. If you look at what you have to do to get GM up and running, its less work then getting WP up and running. Yeah, its good to check the file permissions, but they should be correct all ready in the distribution archive. Just unzip or untar and viola and hit up the gm.cgi script.
I here the newcomer. Not absolutely I will understand with topic. Explain, please. http://kopitop.ru/map.html
I sow this blog and gave many time look, i feel that it is very nice collection of GreyMatter-Style, very informative and knowledgeably.