As someone who runs several websites, I’ve become pretty familiar with some of the common content management systems out there. Although you will find people who advocate for a particular CMS over another, I’m more the kind of person who wants the right tool for the job. No system is right for every situation. So, this article is meant to help you choose which one is right for you! I’ll be touching mostly on WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, though I will throw in a few thoughts about PHP-Nuke, as well.

After using basically every BBCode plugin available for WordPress–and finding every last one of them lacking–I decided to write my own. This one does not use shortcodes, as shortcodes apparently freak out when you want multi-line enclosed tags. My plugin applies filters to six hooks: * the_content * comment_text * the_excerpt * the_content_rss (strips BBCode) * comment_text_rss (strips BBCode) * the_excerpt_rss (strips BBCode) The following tags are supported:

Further posting of my writing is on hold while I work out technical issues. My entire writing archive uses a subset of BBCode for formatting, and it appears none of the BBCode plugins for WordPress actually work. The newest one, which uses shortcodes, seems to have exposed a limitation of the shortcode system. So, I will write my own plugin to introduce a shortcode to include an external file and parse anything that looks like BBCode, all in one shot.