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I have heard many times senior developers asking not to use coldfusion UI tags and that they cause problems. But can someone let me know what kind of problems it creates? I do not use CFML UI tags mostly, but some of the legacy code has them already. So if I have to change them, I need to convince people why they need to be changed. Reasons...
Edit:
I know this has been put on hold, but what I was asking about few points, a list kind of. So when I am talking with someone a client, fellow developer and want to emphasize the reason for not using cfform, I do have those reasons. With lot of good and some not so good answers, I reckon I can put up a list
1) They use old outdated versions of JavaScript libraries and HTML.
2) They have caused security issues in the past.
3) They get in the way of knowing how things actually work.
4) ColdFusion UI does work currently. However, the issue people have is simply, technology changes. It's simple as that really. jQuery and other UIs are constantly changing. Along with a lot of other APIs that ColdFusion UI uses. This means, if you are using ColdFusion 10 today and 5 years from now you are on ColdFusion 13 you may have issues with your ColdFusion 10's UI.
5) Another example is . had an issue recently because it uses google maps and google updated their API. Since the update took place it broke the tag. Since this is a ColdFusion UI and not your own it is difficult to just update the API calls. Which is why it is recommended to use your own. It's a simple fix with jQuery UI but not really ColdFusion UI.
6) Also, a lot of ColdFusion UI messes with your headers. For example, . This tag has been known to break mobile sites and other headers because it adds its own headers to your HTML page.
7) cfinput required="" is conflict with the HTML 5 input required=""
The issues with the UI tags built-in to CF are:
Were written by people who are not CFML developers.
Were written by people who are not HTML/JS developers.
They use old outdated versions of JavaScript libraries and HTML.
They have caused security issues in the past.
They get in the way of knowing how things actually work.
They don't have documentation comparable to the average JS library.
The Flash and XML versions of cfform were especially difficult to work with.
And possibly a few other reasons that have slipped my mind.
If you have old code that uses them, and the code works acceptably, then you're unlikely to get shot for not changing it - assuming there are no further undiscovered security issues, obviously.
(Though of course, whether the code does actually work acceptably or has simply been put up with may be a matter of debate.)
If you're working on new code, you should learn to use modern UI libraries that are written by actual JS developers who understand browsers, libraries that are far more widely tested and documented, that you can understand how they work, that put you in control of what's being done, and so on.
Instead of giving you a link to the solution to a problem that is unknown to #CFML_Developer I will simply briefly explain the issues I've had and other have had with ColdFusion UI.
ColdFusion UI does work currently. However, the issue people have is simply, technology changes. It's simple as that really. jQuery and other UIs are constantly changing. Along with a lot of other APIs that ColdFusion UI uses. This means, if you are using ColdFusion 10 today and 5 years from now you are on ColdFusion 13 you may have issues with your ColdFusion 10's UI.
Another example is <cfmap>. <cfmap> had an issue recently because it uses google maps and google updated their API. Since the update took place it broke the <cfmap>tag. Since this is a ColdFusion UI and not your own it is difficult to just update the API calls. Which is why it is recommended to use your own. It's a simple fix with jQuery UI but not really ColdFusion UI.
Also, a lot of ColdFusion UI messes with your headers. For example, <cfform>. This tag has been known to break mobile sites and other headers because it adds its own headers to your HTML page.
Finally, I personally find all ColdFusion UI more difficult to work with than actual jQuery UI. Just because with jQuery UI you can be specific to your needs and it's a lot more flexible to work with. Honestly, it's also faster to do if you understand jQuery.
Related
We are currently using Adobe ColdFusion 9 for a rather large application. We are thinking about moving to Railo or Blue Dragon.
What problems will we run into?
Will it require a large amount of refactoring or will most CFML code just work on the new system?
Do alternative engines provide support for most all official tags, or are they more limited?
In short, how divergent are these alternatives from the official language?
Is there anything we can do to make this process less painful (like upgrading to CF11 first or removing/avoiding certain features)?
My question is similar to What Notable Differences are there between Railo, Open Bluedragon, and Adobe Coldfusion?, but while that is concerned with practical differences I'm asking more specifically about practicality of transition/implementation.
It all depends on your code and the specific Adobe ColdFusion functionality that you are using. For the most part each CFML iteration supports the same tags/functionality. Where they deviate from the Adobe product is usually documented and explained. You need to dive into your code base and look specifically at the features you are using and compare those to the CFML engine of your choosing. Or you can just download and spin-up the alternate CFML engine, drop your code base in it and see what breaks.
As an example from Railo - CFML Compatibility
Railo tries to adhere the CFML standard as good as possible, Still there are some differences like missing tags and functions or a slightly different behavior. This page and the ones below should describe the incompatibilities.
And I have to question what you are basing this comment on? "and especially it's very uncertain future with them". You are running ColdFusion 9. Adobe has implemented two major version releases since then (10 and 11) and are currently working on the future release.
There are two main areas that can prove problematic when migrating from Adobe ColdFusion to Railo:
Use of feature areas that are not supported by Railo
Sloppy CFML code
The former includes integration with Microsoft technologies, such as Exchange and Sharepoint, as well as Office document manipulation; PDF forms and some of the more sophisticated document manipulations; UI "widget" integration. There are third party extensions for some of the Microsoft integrations, e.g., cfSpreadsheet, but for PDF-related stuff you'll need to roll your own using Java libraries (PDF forms and high quality HTML to PDF conversion are Adobe specialties so be prepared to do quite a bit of work in your migration if you rely on these). As for the UI "widgets", you're better off doing that the "right way" so if you rely on those, you should read ColdFusion UI The Right Way.
The latter is a harder issue to nail down. The differences are not well documented - except in experience posts to mailing lists and blogs by people who've made the transition to Railo - but they include things like:
Using scope names as variables (Railo treats scopes as reserved names for performance reasons)
Embedding comments inside tags, e.g., <cfif x gt y <!--- check boundary --->> (I've seen things like this in older CFML code and was surprised it worked).
Reliance on automatic creation of nested struct elements, e.g., a.b.c = 0 when a has not been declared.
Reliance on long-deprecated features, e.g., parameterExists().
There are many other small differences: Railo is generally stricter about syntax and semantics than Adobe ColdFusion, and often those decisions are driven by performance concerns in that compatibility with Adobe ColdFusion would make Railo slower.
Full disclosure here: I have used Railo pretty much exclusively for five years and I used to run the US arm of Railo's consulting business. That said, you need to consider that Railo is a small company (despite the backing of five fairly large former Adobe partners) with just a handful of people working on the engine, and very little awareness of the product outside the more leading edge portion of the CFML community. By comparison, Adobe have a large team and a marketing budget. Your concerns about the difficulty of finding developers will not be addressed by switching to Railo - to gain access to a larger developer pool, you'd really need to switch to a more popular language, not just a different engine.
Finally, a word about Blue Dragon's engine, specifically Open BlueDragon: the maintainers of that project have stated publicly several times that compatibility with the other engines (Adobe, Railo) is not a primary concern for them, and indeed there are a lot of modern language features that they still don't support or at least don't support in a compatible manner. Last I checked, full-script components were on that list despite having been supported in Adobe ColdFusion and Railo for many years (by which I mean using component { ... } rather than the <cfcomponent><cfscript> .. </cfscript></cfcomponent> form). The BlueDragon dialect of CFML has been steadily diverging over the years so unless you have very old school CFML, that would still run on CFMX7 / ACF8, you probably won't have much success trying to migrate to Open BlueDragon.
There are a couple good answers here and I appreciate the advice given in them. When I asked this question I was looking for something a little more specific, so now that I've had the chance to really play around with migrating our app to Railo I thought I should come back and list out the issues we've run into and, just as importantly, the severity and workarounds. Hopefully this will help others considering making the jump:
cfMessageBox:
cfMessageBox is not a supported tag in Railo. The best solution we've come up with is to create a new custom tag called MessageBox.cfm, then drop it into “{railo-install}/lib/railo-server/context/library/tag/”. This will allow it to be recognized as a core tag and referenced via “”, which saves us from updating hundreds of templates that call it. This, of course, requires us to create a message box custom tag from the ground up.
cfDiv:
cfDiv seems to be throwing a JS error when used to bind to a JS function. I'm going to guess that this is because JS binding is not officially supported (given that I can't find any reference in the official docs), and while ACF allows it as delayed execution, Railo simply doesn’t accept it. We could just create a custom tag that generates a JS setTimeout as described in (1) above, which solved our problem, but applications that actually use this tag for its intended purpose may have a more difficult road ahead.
cfWindow:
There appears to be limited support for cfWindow in Railo. Specifically, new windows need manually shown, and the destroy methods do not exist. Various other bugs appeared as well. We decided that it made more sense to just move to JQuery based modals.
cfLayout:
cfLayout support is questionable. It is based on JQuery and not Ext-JS like ACF’s version. This causes a problem because we run JQuery 1.10 right now and the built-in tag doesn’t appear to work beyond JQuery 1.8. In fact, I could not find any JQuery version within which the tag worked perfectly. We decided that it may be best to, again, just write our own custom tag based on JQuery.
cfDocument:
cfDocument works differently in Railo and seems to require more strict HTML. I found a lot of helpful information here, though as of yet I haven't actually gotten any of my cfDocument calls to work as expected.
Relative cfLocations:
cfLocations that began with a “../” and backtracked beyond the webroot would throw a weird Java error. This ended up being a bug in Tomcat, and was patched by the Railo team in version 4.3.1.003. If you download an older Railo version you may run into this issue and need to update all of your cfLocation calls.
Oracle Thin Client:
Our database guy reported to me that he setup the Oracle Thin Client, because the OCI client is not natively supported in Railo. I found this, which might be relevant, but I don't have the expertise to say for sure.
Documentation:
ACF Livedocs are sometimes aggravating as they don't touch on the more important intricacies of how some tags are implemented, but Railo's version is the definition of minimalist. I think it's fair to say that Railo has no docs specifying each tag and function and that they leave you to rely on Adobe for that, which causes a serious issue when you need to know how the two implementations differ.
In the end it seems like, as predicted by previous answers, the UI tags were the bulk of our issues. Based on previous comments I was hoping for better implementations of them that may just require a tweak here and there, but (at least for our needs) the Railo versions seem borderline non-functional and it looks like we would need to replace them completely. For us, this may not be realistic, though we are still tossing the idea around.
To be fair, here are some of the good points from our research and testing:
Performance:
Although compatibility problems have prevented me from doing much performance testing, initial spot checks show approximately a 50% decrease in execution time for most pages.
Debugging:
The debugging options in Railo are quite amazing. There are far more options for formatting, including specifying different formats for different developers (IP addresses). One incredible feature is the inclusion of a comma delimited list of query fields that were actually used in the page: this could allow you to effectively develop based on a "select *" query and simply copy and paste the fieldlist into the query at the end of development, which would save a lot of time with views as large as the ones we're using.
Cost:
This is one of the larger reasons we decided to look into alternatives. Switching just a few Enterprise licensed ACF servers over to Railo would save $20k+ over upgrading to the newest version of ACF. Further, with the performance increases you could see an even greater savings in hardware requirements. A side effect of this point is that one can keep far more up to date without the constant cost/benefit analysis of licensing costs holding up upgrades.
Support:
Without a support contract, it doesn't seem like Adobe responds to user concerns. I've had a production impacting bug reported since ACF 9 which still hasn't been fixed. Yet the Railo community is one of the most helpful and responsive I've ever seen, and developers have even responded directly to concerns and bug reports I've raised.
Longevity:
This is a highly opinionated point, of course, but while Adobe seems to be relegating ACF to the shadows more and more with each new version, Railo appears to be dedicated to growing the community. Combined with its open source nature I think this makes it a safer bet for future support in the long term, even if that support is just us taking development into our own hands when needed.
For a number of reasons, including divergent CFML compatibility, we did not even get to the testing stage with Blue Dragon.
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I want to make my career in ColdFusion. I'm trying to learn ColdFusion with this Book "Adobe ColdFusion 9 Web Application Construction Kit, Volume 1 - Getting Started"
So far I've reached Page - 350.
Anyways. I want a serious suggestions for making career as a ColdFusion Developer.
I need answers to these questions: (What I was really asking)
1) How much time would it take to master ColdFusion?
2) What frameworks are best?
3) What other technologies are required with ColdFusion?
4) What are your personal experiences as a ColdFusion Developer?
EDIT:
I know little bit of php and Java and when I compare it to ColdFusion, then ColdFusion seems to be a billion times easier than php. It's not that I don't like php, but just saying.
As I have some experience with Java I think it can help me with ColdFusion Development.
I planned to learn a new language once I do average with ColdFusion Development. Like Objective C. I don't know whether ColdFusion and iOS Development is a nice combination or not.
Programming is both an art and a science. I suggest you will never "master" it, and you should take on a mindset of always learning and growing.
A framework is a tool. Use the right tool for the job. Frameworks like FW/1 and Coldbox, though completely different, each serve a purpose.
You should probably spend some time learning about the environments you will run in. Web servers like Apache, Nginx, and IIS. ColdFusion runs on Java, so it wouldn't hurt to learn more about Java as a language, as well as Java EE servers like Tomcat, etc...
I make a living as a full time ColdFusion and .NET developer. CF doesn't always have a stellar reputation, but it can do job very well like most other web-based languages.
I would advice you never limit yourself to just one language/stack/OS/technology. Seeking out other perspectives only enhances your experience and ability.
I was able to create useful things in one day. (Thank you cfinclude). After 15 years, I am still mastering it. ColdFusion is a part of a technology stack. One does not learn ColdFusion on its own. It is ColdFusion + HTML, ColdFusion + SQL, ColdFusion + jQuery, ColdFusion + Java. Some of the more interesting recent (July 2013) work I have seen is ColdFusion + angular.js.
FW/1 works great for me
See 1 above. In 2013, the place where ColdFusion shines, is it can bring very diverse technologies together in a clean format.
This ColdFusion developer has had to deal with "Isn't ColdFusion dead?" for many, many years. At one time ColdFusion pushed the envelope in what was possible. Today, it doesn't. In many ways it is dead. Sure, Adobe is maintaining it. Railo is working on a very good clone. The momentum is not there.
In response to
3) What other technologies are required with ColdFusion?
A typical ColdFusion application will include a database. Learn data modelling. It's the most important piece of the puzzle. A good database design will make everything else so much easier. To this end, I've heard good things about the book, Database Design for Mere Mortals.
SQL is also important. If your applications include a database you will have to write queries. I've also heard good things about the book, Teach Yourself SQL in 10 minutes, by Ben Forta, who also wrote your WACK.
A typical ColdFusion application will include web pages. Learn html, javascript, and css.
Good luck.
It very much depends what type of work you want to do.
If you want to build websites then cf is not the best solution as it lacks just about everything in thia area fue to lack of open source apps and creates more work for you as a result compared to php, you would be better off mastering the popular cms and open source systems and things like jQuery, css, bootstrsp etc.
If you want to build bespoke applications and work on backend systems then cf is perfect for that type of work as you are builfing something from scratch so cf still gives you the RAD advantage.
If you like cf then you should Also should take a look at groovy, grails and railo.
I would suggest you look at what jobs are available in you area first before making a decision.
The other technologies you should learn depends again on what you want to do, front or backend.
At the very least ajax, jquery, sql, html and css need to be learnt, you can't do much webvwork without those.
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I am writing this to get a more realistic view of what I should be able to achieve.
I have been learning web development for just about a month now. Below are my level of proficiency on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being not having to use google or ask a question on stackoverflow to solve all encountered issues)
Skills
Django: 5
jquery/ajax: 4.5 to 5
Html: 5
(just simple html code, having the "bone structure" of the site laid out without any fancy formatting or design)
using CSS: 0 (I think it's called css)
These are, from my understanding of the skills required to develop a site.
Am I a fast learner?
I started a month back at 0 in all categories (with limited to medium programming experience in other languages), I don't know if this counts as fast.
GOAL:
As a learning experience, I am trying to develop a news website where users subscribe to different news categories (ex: 'US news', 'Europe', 'Business'...) and they would get, in their news feed (a lot like facebook's news feed that automatically gets updated) feeds that are related to the categories they are subscribed to.
I haven't tackled website design yet; even though it is just for learning purposes, I would ultimately really like to have a nice design set up for the site, and deployed it on a server just so I would go through all the steps needed to actually launch a site.
I would really like to hear some feedback on feasibility/ get some insights on some of your personal professional experience on:
1- Hey is it feasible for a newbie to learn off the internet everything he needs to pull this off!!??
2- I am having a hard time putting a "deadline" to achieve this. How long will it take you to finish this? how long do you think it takes an almost complete novice to do this :)
Any other remarks/comments are welcome,
Thanks for sharing!!
-Rami
I think you may be over-rating your django skills a little there! I'd say someone is probably at 6/10, or 7, when they're relatively comfortable with the AOP parts of django - i.e. metaclasses, decorators, and so forth. That said, apologies if you are at this level!
I dare say what you'll find yourself doing is making the site so that it works - this won't take long at all - and then doing a ~huge re-write using more sophisticated code. And so on.
Another issue you may have with a dynamic site like this is database optimizations and, though not really applicable for a feeds-based site, caching. I'm currently working on doing optimizations on a large website, where the initial programmer didn't care about efficiency so long as it worked. So it became incredibly inefficient, some pages using 1000+ queries (though not bad code, at all, really) - some model methods potentially doing 50k+ queries (ouch!). Most optimizations were fairly trivial (select_related, annotate, aggregate, update, etc) - some were outside of the ORM's scope and required raw SQL and/or efficient c-based algorithms. The latter have sped some pages up from ~700queries/7seconds to 3queries in 0.4seconds - impossible to do in just django.
All in all, how long it'll take to make the website depends on your audience. If its for <100 users, then it won't take you long at all (apart from the design, I could spend years playing with css and my site would still look ugly) - if its intended for a much larger user-base, then you could be spending a lot longer on it... in my opinion!
1- Hey is it feasible for a newbie to
learn everything he needs of the
internet and pull this off!!??
Completely! The information is all there. Django is an extremely well documented framework. You might have to use the brain for specific actions but most of it already exists in the framework or by using plugins. The rest you already know. As for the CSS part, get a theme from some online site and adapt it to your needs. Keep backups to revert to in case you destroy something.
2- I am having a hard time putting a
"deadline" to achieve this. How long
will it take you to finish this? how
long do you think it takes an almost
complete novice to do this :)
Can't help you there.. No one works the same way and that will be based on your experience, knowledge, background and so on. Start doing it and adapt as you go.
Good luck!
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I'm pretty handy with django and python but I'm terrible at the "visual" aspect of the web-design. Even after quite a bit of google-ing I haven't been able to find any sort of resource that has download-able templates complete with css, images, etc. that could be used to set up a basic website easily.
I'm looking for examples beyond the 5-line examples that you find in most tutorials ... I'm looking for something with the general nav-bar across the top, various content-blocks to over-ride through subclassing, footers, etc.
I've worked with others on django projects but always on the "coding side". I want to do my own project. I've set up all of the views, models, "business logic", I just cant get off the ground with the design section.
Any help would be appreciated.
Edit: Just to be a little more clear. I'm looking for designs (open licensed) ... akin to Wordpress themes. If you have a resource of just themes I can probably mung them into a django template but if you know of something that already provides them as templates I'd prefer that.
I've had some luck in the past with sites like OpenDesigns and FreeCSSTemplates -- they offer (mostly) CC-licensed HTML templates; you'll have to add the Django template stuff yourself. As James pointed out though, most of them will get you up and running, but you almost always want to take things a step further.
My advice: build up a small library of re-usable templates (using stuff from the above sites), get real comfortable editing HTML and CSS (because you will edit HTML and CSS), then find some kickass designers (preferably local) and get real friendly with them. Perhaps you can trade favors; you do some coding work for them, for free, and in return they do some design work for you. I've found that even if you have to pay, a good designer is well worth the money (seriously, who wants to spend their time testing sites in IE6?).
Good luck with your search though -- I, for one, would love to see your findings.
It seems like this is an area that is completely lacking. I've been looking for a django project, perhaps a meta-django project is a good way to go ;).
Maybe if designers could upload a set of templates against a simple and well defined set of models. They could upload a "main.html", "object_list.html", "object_detail.html", a css file and a few images. This would be something akin to the CSS Zen Garden project.
I've setup a github repository here: http://github.com/JudoWill/DjangoTemplateRepository. Feel free to log into the project and modify the wiki with requests.
The idea being to give newbies a starting point and a few examples for making their django website.
I suspect this has got nothing to do with django templates, your question sounds more of a design and markup. There are couple of css framework like Blueprint, 960, YAML.
I don't think you're going to be able to find what you're looking for unfortunately - I have the same problem.
Wordpress templates can assume a fairly well-known data model - every Wordpress installation uses the same predictable table names, every (say) blog page has a well-defined set of data that will be passed to the template - and even the plugins have only a limited number of plugin points to add extra data.
By contrast, your Django app could contain anything. I could provide you a pretty template, but unless the data I use in the template exactly matches your data model, it's not going to be useful. I could make the template very very generic - eg, just have it display the variable called 'form' if it's present, iterate over 'messages' if any are present at the top of the page, display a 'footer' at the bottom etc - but it will take you about 20 seconds before you want to customise the display of that form, and then you're back editing your own templates.
I think that the closest thing you're going to find are UI libraries like jQuery or YUI which can handle a lot of the work of making your UI look snazzy.
I'd like to be proven wrong though, it would save me going through the same trial as you're going through now.
Update: On re-reading this, it occurred to me that you're looking for a CMS, which Django is not. Two seconds of work with Google revealed django CMS. I haven't tried it, but maybe that's closer to what you're looking for? The django wiki has a comparison table of various django-based CMS solutions
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I am about to start a new project and would like to document its development in a very simple blog.
My requirements are:
self-hosted on my Gentoo-based LAMP stack (that seems to rule out blogger)
Integration in a django based website (as in www.myproject.com/about, www.myproject.com/blog etc rather than www.myproject.com and a totally different site at blog.myproject.com)
very little or no learning curve that's specific to the blog engine (don't want to learn an API just to blog, but having to get deeper into Django to be able to roll my own would be OK) According to the answers so far, there is a chance that this excludes Wordpress
Should I
a) install blog engine X (please specify X)
b) use django to hand-roll a way to post new entries and a page on my website to display the posts in descending chronological order
Install Wordpress. It is the most common engine for a reason. It's PHP but will play just fine in your environment.
If you're the perfectionist kind, roll your own.
It isn't that hard
You learn something useful
You'll get exactly what you want and need
Be warned that you may run into a quagmire fighting comment spam, fixing security holes, etc. But it'll probably be a fun project.
If you are the practical type and ready to face some integration pain, use an existing engine like WadcomBlog (Python) or PyBlosxom, or something completely different like MovableType or WordPress.
Here's a simple Django blog example to get you started.
Some pros and cons of rolling your blog engine this article by Phil Haack.
Jeff Croft apparently rolled his own as well.
I've tried WordPress recently and am very disappointed. As long as you don't want to customize anything, all is well. But imagine you want to install a plugin to handle Markdown editing. There the trouble begins. The plugin architecture of WordPress is seriously screwd up. In the case of Markdown, this means that no good solution exists. The existing plugin is a series of (quite well-documented) hacks that fall apart at a hard stare.
I never intended to write the least bit of code for WordPress but the last few days, I've been knee-deep in PHP the whole time, hacking plugins as well as the WordPress core in order to make it work for my special scenario (which really isn't all that special, I'm just a perfectionist). Which is a pity, because the documentation of WordPress is more than just patchy. I don't use it anymore, I grep for functions and read the source. All in all, one of the less enjoyable OpenSource projects.
You can spend hours if not days customizing Wordpress with plugins, themes, etc...
I would go with a 0 installation solution, such as blogger (https://www.blogger.com/start)
You can even use our own domain name with it if you need do.
EDIT: Plus, if you ever get slashdotted, digged or redditted, google can handle the traffic, your server probably can't.
For me, Wordpress is still the quickest & simplest to setup and get going. It can be extended to do pretty much anything or you can keep it real simple. Runs on PHP, but unless you want to write plugins for it, you never need to write code
Have a look at Blosxom. It's file-based, so no crufty database. The basic idea has been ported to different languages, pyblosxom is in Python.
I use PyBlosxom for my personal blog, and I think it is pretty useful if you need something minimalistic. The deployment is simple, as you need only the python runtime and cgi. You might want to have some basic knowledge of python at least if you are going to use it, though.
Have a look at Blosxom. It's file-based, so no crufty database. The basic idea has been ported to different languages, pyblosxom is in Python.
I wrote the engine for my personal blog in maybe 6 hours during one weekend, with comments, labels, simplified markup, sitemap, feeds and so on. It was great fun and I learned a lot of Django.
If you decide to go this way, look at generic views, this Django feature will save you much of work (and learn few useful tricks).
I Haven't tried it myself yet (other than the demo), but I've bookmarked Chyrp so that if I ever need to set up a quick & simple blog (kind of like you're describing) I could try this. So check it out, might be a good option for you.