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I think that automated unit testing is the future of killing bugs. In layman's terms, this involves a program trawling your code and automatically trying to break it. If done well, the system can replace some of your QA team, and QA goes a lot faster. I hadn't even heard of such a thing until I did some contract work for Agitar, one of the companies doing this stuff. Here's a link with an overview & screenshots:

http://www.agitar.com/products/20051101-agitator.h tml

They only work with Java. Here is a link to a page where they ran some Open Source products through their tool & published the results:

http://www.agitar.com/openquality/

But Agitar's product isn't Open Source itself. :(

-Tony

I think that automated unit testing is the future of killing bugs. In layman's terms, this involves a program trawling your code and automatically trying to break it. If done well, the system can replace some of your QA team, and QA goes a lot faster. I hadn't even heard of such a thing until I did some contract work for Agitar, one of the companies doing this stuff. Here's a link with an overview & screenshots:

http://www.agitar.com/products/20051101-agitator.h tml

They only work with Java. Here is a link to a page where they ran some Open Source products through their tool & published the results:

http://www.agitar.com/openquality/

But Agitar's product isn't Open Source itself. :(

-Tony

Ever since a year ago, when I was laid off, I've been contracting for companies who need CMS software. I've tried a LOT of them at this point.

Agitar Software uses Movable Type to power their site. It's a corporate site, not really a blog. I added a boatload of PHP statements to the MT templates, so that it would provide i18n (the pages get generated with PHP code in them, then they become dynamic PHP files on the server). Unfortunately, we don't do much with the i18n yet. No matter what you pick, it's in English. But we've got a translation firm on the hook, so that will change. I also work on Developer Testing, which is far, far more bloggy (also uses MT).

Mill Valley Film Festival uses Drupal. It isn't really bloggy, but on the backend, that's how it works. There are a few "blogs" available (such as "Film Listings"), and the staff add in entries. I also have just started a very basic drupal blog for my daughter's class.

I have a boatload of other blog-like sites I maintain (mostly using Mambo & Joomla), and I've even open-sourced some software to turn phpBB into a blogging system.

So, with some credentials out of the way, here's my impressions.

First, Movable Type is archaic, even with the new 3.2 update. It's great for old-school Web publishing, where the main players know a few HTML tags and dynamic publishing isn't terribly urgent. Yes, MT can do dynamic publishing, but there are other systems that do that waaaaayyy better. So its strength is more along the lines of "update & release, update & release."

It has hard-coded fields, but you can muck around with them (moreso in 3.2). We use those fields for features that don't really tie into the fields anymore. For example, when a user wants to control the URL of an entry, he/she fills out our keywords field. It's just how the solutions have evolved.

I think MT is weakest at looping through entries. The entire scoping system is arbitrary. Some plugins sometimes return global loops, other times narrowly-scoped loops, which can be really not-fun to learn about. Overall, Movable Type seems to me to be a workhorse, reliable, but old and no longer well-devised.

Drupal is very frustrating. The template system is rigid. The PHPTemplate plugin helps. I used it exclusively on mvff.com. But it still requires a huge investment into figuring out how it works. In some cases, I ended up posting support questions and then later answering them myself on drupal.org -- partly because the forums are quiet, and partly because I was pushing the system waaaayy more than the bulk of users do. But what's surprising is that I wasn't doing much. You can see that from mvff.com -- it's just a film Web site. It's not highly sophisticated. If you're going to be building a typical site and the system requires so much tweaking that you become a bleeding-edge pioneer for it, that's a bit much. Drupal is too technical for the average blogger.

What Drupal does well is the plugin system. A default install of Drupal comes with a boatload of plugins. Want forums? Just click a button. Want blogs? Click a button. Want an image gallery? Click a button. For example, with the school blog that I built using Drupal, I went with almost all of the defaults, and it was a lot easier to setup. It took maybe 3 hours from start to finish. It also looks really plain and doesn't do much, however. And I'm still having trouble getting the TinyMCE HTML GUI to work properly on that system. I don't know why yet.

Joomla seems to be the best of both worlds -- a fair balance of tradeoffs on the technical side, but also a backend control pa

From a scan of the Agitar forums it looks like they use JDK 1.5 annotations to do a sort of design by contract thing. Annotations are a great idea for this sort of thing; I've been working annotations into PMD to suppress warnings and it makes things a lot clearer.

Agitation takes Java byte code and exercises it in a comprehensive fashion to observe its behaviors. It presents these observations to developers, who can respond in these ways:

• If the observation points out behavior that should not occur, developers can trace down the cause of the problem and fix the defect.
• If the observation indicates expected behavior, developers can promote it to a durable unit test with a single click of the mouse.