Suggestion for a personal blog with a few requirements [closed]

Question

I am currently thinking about re-doing my blog, possibly from scratch¹ since the existing installation has a few problems already and I may need to rewrite most articles anyway due to some changes with input formats.

As outlined in this question² I suffer from two filters in Drupal battling each other and generally not working nicely together. I kinda fixed it by now but in my experience this is very brittle and might as well break with the next update again. And I need to re-write every article with code in it due to the changes to make it work again.

Generally, I need the following (hard) requirements:

1. Syntax highlighting (passable quality, so no SO-style random guessing what it shouldn't look like) not only for "common" languages but also for more rare ones such as Batch files, Windows PowerShell or Postscript (no, Whitespace is not yet a requirement).³
2. Internationalization support. I started my blog mostly in two languages (German and English) and would like to continue so. That means that every article needs to be translatable and this connection is available to the system (setting up two sites, one for each language, wouldn't retain the connection between a post and its translation and is therefore explicitly not desired).
3. I don't really want to write HTML. For what it's worth, my stance on Wiki-like markup languages shifted too in recent times so I'm not entirely sure I would want a simple markup language as a replacement, so WYSIWYG would be ok too. I've used Texy! on my blog so far which is nice enough (also in that it allows for more complex formatting) but in general I'm currently keeping at least three or four different simple markup languages in mind and constantly confuse them, so it's definitely not ideal.

Nice to have (but not an actual hard requirement) would be:

1. Support for editing/authoring with external applications. Currently I'm looking at Windows Live Writer and like it a lot, but with my current setup there are a few problems at the moment:
   1. WLW won't detect the theme properly (not a show stopper, just a minor annoyance)
   2. I have no access to my created taxonomies (categories in Drupal), though I probably could create new ones from within WLW. Haven't looked deeply into that so far
   3. The available source code plugins for WLW all don't support batch files, some don't even support PowerShell. They seemingly mostly restrict themselves to C# and ASP.NET. Very unfortunate.
   4. I can't handle i18n from within WLW, which definitely is a show-stopper.

If anyone has ideas or suggestions what could work with above requirements, I'd appreciate them. If minor things are missing I might be able to work around them (such as missing syntax highlighting for certain languages but an easy way to integrate new languages) but I'd rather take something that "just works" than fiddle too much with it as I simply don't have the time and motivation.

---

¹ Though I would greatly prefer keeping the current installation and CMS (Drupal) since that won't break any URLs.

² Wrongly migrated to Stack Overflow, though it definitely doesn't belong there (neither the question nor any answer on it have anything to do with programming), so the migration didn't exactly serve a useful purpose.

³ SyntaxHighlighter looks nice enough, though. Might be a viable option.

Answer 1

Wordpress, with some plugins, can satisfactory your requirements. Also, there are some nice desktop client for Wordpress.

Answer 2

I only have good knowledge of Drupal and as the proverb goes, "if your only tool is a hammer...", so take my answer more in the line of hot to do it with Drupal rather than a *Drupal is the best tool for your job* (it might well be that it is not!). That said:

1. As you probably know already, the key to make filters work together is the order you apply them. I assume you already tried that (but I still thought to mention it for other readers that might not have experience with Drupal).
2. I don't know about texy, but markdown, the same filter used on SU and SO, is supported by Drupal too and it works fine together with the GeSHI filter (again, it's a matter of filter arrangement)
3. Syntax highlighting: I would stick with GeSHI, there is an ever-growing amount of languages supported, and however GeSHI is designed to extensible by the end-user, so it should be possible to create relatively easily your own language files, if you really can't find what you need.
4. Internationalisation: Well... that works pretty good in Drupal as it is, I find!
5. No HTML: As stated before, I do not know texy, but I like markdown a lot for two reasons: a) it's very readable in it's own source format b) it allows you to throw in the occasional tag that you might need. Although with the WYSIWYG module things have improved a lot, I find that WYSIWYG editors tend to generate sub-par HTML and make the site slower. Just a matter of tastes of course, but for power-users I prefer markdown.
6. Support for editing/authoring with external applications: the most obvious implementation of this feature would be IMO with the BlogAPI module (presently in the drupal core). This uses xml-rpc for communicating with other application, following well-known API. Blogapi support taxonomy setting and taxonomy retrieval. The various API defined in the module are supported by most external blogging applications. I am not a windows user, so I can't actually share experience about windows clients.
7. As for i18n offline support: I am unsure if BlogAPI has that capability embedded. I could not find any obvious reference to this online. However, if that is a must, I would use a taxonomy term for the language and implement hook_insert() in order to set the language of the node based on that term.

As specified beforehand, I am not claiming Drupal is the best platform ever to achieve what you need, but I found it was an interesting question and was interested in contributing as far as I could.

I would be very interested to hear what your final decision/platform will be.

HTH!

Answer 3

Have a look at Wikidot.
They have lots of features, although not 100% of what you ask for.