Mário Andrade

I started blogging back in 2003 in a time where acquiring a domain and hosting was a considerable investment to a simple student.
Content Management Systems where complex to understand and use from a regular internet user point of view and to be honest there wasn’t that much Free CMS to choose from. The most common solution would be Blogger or Typepad. This is my public manifesto to what I believe blogs content management systems fail.

Today I’ve had, in overall, a total of 8 weblogs and I’m a devoted blogger to my portuguese blog about blogging and WordPress, muiomuio.net, since 2006.

Hover the years I’ve seen hundreds of new themes, trends and page layouts, some really appealing but not really that functional, others really simple and functional but still 99% of blogs fail in the same aspect that other kind of websites are really good at. I’ve talked several times about it in muiomuio.net and alerted the readers giving several tips on how to change / improve their blogs.

Duplicated content

A “standard” blog theme is built in a way that will favor duplicated content. For example, you write a post, that text will show up in at least 2 places the homepage and the post page. Even though you can change that by adding excerpts, the excerpt will still show up in the homepage and archive page.

Mr. John Chow

The simple solution is to write a post, write an excerpt that is an introduction and complementary to the post and use that text in the homepage and archives page.
Further more you need to define that you do not want search engine crawlers / robots to index or follow your archive pages.

As you see you need to have some programing skills or ask someone in order to have a fully optimized website.

How to show excerpts instead of full post on the homepage

This is a sample of the code I have on the homepage of this blog:

<?php if (!empty($post->post_excerpt)) : ?>
	<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
		<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>" rel="nofollow">Continue reading: <b><?php the_title(); ?></b></a>
	<?php else : ?>
		<?php the_content(); ?>
	<?php endif; ?>

I check if the excerpt field has content, if so than shows the post_excerpt, otherwise shows the normal post content. Ultimately I use the excerpt as an introduction to my posts and also use it in the post itself.

Homepage structure

Inicially a blog was built upon a newspaper website structure where the homepage shows the most recent “news”. Altought the idea is good the implementation of it is, nowadays, less than great.
Like I said many times on my Portuguese blog muiomuio.net, the homepage must work as a channel to the post pages and it would be great if every post would have a thumbnail image on the homepage.

Mr. Jeremy “Shoemoney”

But again the homepage, in practically all blog CMS, shows the content of the most recent posts which will lead you to the duplicated content issue.

Take notice that duplicated content is not only a search engine issue. If a user has all the content in the homepage why would he / she go to the post page? Maybe to comment but not all readers comment. By showing all your blog post on the homepage you are removing many call to actions like sharing in social media, bookmarking and possibly profit from that specific post page.

Additional but important functionality

Blogging Content Management Systems are still very raw. Almost all of them offer only the default functionality in the installation pack.

Related Posts
Related posts should be a default functionality of all Content Management Systems. The user would than define if this functionality is active or not.

Share on Social Web
Social Web is important to every blog. The CMS should support the chance to submit content to the popular Social Networks and the module should also make it simple for the user to add new websites.

I understand that a CMS has to keep in mind that not all users want the same functionality and most of them offer extra functionality with components, modules and plugins. The porpuse of this article is to expose what I believe are “near-standard” functionalities and should be implemented by default on Content Management Systems.

If you have something to add, disagree with my point of view or want to share your experience, I would love the hear from you. Please leave a comment.