I love GetSimple because it's intuitive and therefore easy to learn for users who want a simple content management system.
It's not WordPress, which is the default open source blogging platform for me. (Even more importantly, it's not Joomla or Drupal.) In order to use it as a blog, you need to use a plugin. The downside to using a plugin is that not all plugins work well, and every plugin you add creates additional opportunities for conflicts.
The upside, of course, is that you get a chance to learn something new.
When I decided to add a blog to my portfolio, I knew from the start that I would use GetSimple, simply because I like it and I've never had the opportunity to use it as a blog before.
I decided to go with the "News Manager" plugin, because it has a long history, good support, and was recently updated.
In fact, the biggest challenge in creating this blog had nothing to do with GetSimple. Rather, the challenge was a design one: how to make a blog look like my main portfolio website that accomodated all the elements of a CMS, such as navigation menus. (I deliberately designed my portfolio to be a single page, since it didn't make sense any other way.)
In the end, I decided against including a navigation menu. After a lot of thought, I decided that I really didn't need any additional options except two:
- The words "Web Portfolio" in the header are now a link back to the main portfolio.
- I included an additional credit in the footer for GetSimple.
That's it!
Less really is more.
I'm sure I'll have to make some adjustments as I continue to add blog posts (approximately one per month is my current plan). That's really the great thing about web development: there's always something new to learn.
If you're curious, here's a peek at what the backend of GetSimple looks like:
