As you probably don’t know, I’m the webmaster (this word sounds so 90’s…) of the Cool Cavemen Band website, which is powered by e107 Content Managment System. Unfortunately we started some months ago to get lots of comment spams (at least 10 per day), and the number of them keeps increasing. Another site I host and manage, Maomium, is also invaded by spammers.
Beside this, I run this blog, powered by Wordpress, since april ‘06 and thanks to the Akismet anti-spam plug-in, my comments are free of viagra and porn links. To get the benefits of such a plug-in, I decided to… write an Akismet plug-in for e107… migrate from e107 to Wordpress.
Akismet was the main reason, but here are the 3 others:
- Wordpress has friendly URLs,
— which is great from a search engine optimisation point of view; - Wordpress has XML-RPC ping,
— to publish posts to popular sites like Feed Burner, Feedster, Technorati and much more (= faster and easier content spreading through the net); - Wordpress community is bigger,
— than the e107 one, which mean more plugins, more themes, bigger dynamics regarding code and security updates.
By doing this migration, I expect to have :
- a spam free site,
- well-indexed content,
- a better spreading of Cool Cavemen’s news and activities.
On the other hand, this migration make me loose some features :
- Forums
- Image Gallery
- Newsletters
- Event Calendar
Even if those features are not built-in in Wordpress, I expect to find some plug-ins to fill the gap (I’ll probably post the result of my investigations on that blog).
To conclude, I would like to thanks the whole e107 team for their impressive and hard work. I would also like to thank members of the e107 community who helped me to resolve bugs and problems. I enjoyed my 2 years as e107 user, but my needs changed and to reflects this I had to change softwares too. Sorry e107 !
To keep the spam from making it onto the website all you have to do is install ecaptcha plugin :p
Hi Rik,
To be honest, I discovered ecaptcha plugin several hours after I published this article, when the v1.6 was released on e107coders.org.
The captcha solution is good for the short term (let anonymous post comments) but I don’t like this solution for the mid/long term, for two reasons:
That’s why I still prefer Akismet solution and its collaborative / social networking approach.
As for the gallery you think you’ll be missing, personally recommend you menalto gallery combined with the respective plugin to embed this into wordpress, this looks great on a site like this one.
i’m quite sure you can embed forums too (with user integration)
Last time I tried Menalto Gallery, the installation process was so protective (you have to create files on your server during installation to validate it) that I didn’t succeed to finish the setup. I also think gallery is too big, complicated and has too many unneeded features.
I would like a simple gallery plugin that is similar to Autogallery. And if I’m not wrong, the author of autogallery designed it without strong e107 dependencies, so I hope to be able to keep it running in a stand-alone mode beside Wordpress.
Another interresting light-weight gallery is ZenPhoto.
Yes, the critical feature for wordpress integration with other online software is to let them share the same user database.