Userland Manila

The web content management flavor of Userland Frontier. http://manila.userland.com/

Dave Winer ran a free WebLog hosting service on Manila for a while (sites still run on it, but no more will be added). Other companies host Manila sites for a fee. Or you can buy it yourself to run your own site or sites.

I've run my WebLog on Manila for years at http://webseitz.editThisPage.com/ (one of the free-hosted domains).

I like it a lot, it's super-convenient for blogging. Some good features (for me):

• very easy to add new content, older stuff gets pushed into daily archives

• browser-based, can edit from anywhere

• can use Microsoft's D H T M L Editor tool if using Internet Explorer, which gives it a decent GUI.

• automatically provides Rs S view for syndication/aggregation.

But, I intend to leave it eventually because:

• performance is highly variable (this might be solved by moving to a for-fee hosting of Manila).

• if you don't use D H T M L Editor tool, then you're still writing HTML code, which is annoying to edit (much moreso than Zope's Structured Text or Wiki).

• I don't like the data model that treats all entries for a day as a single story

• for some reason I'm never encouraged to write longer documents in it. This may be because:

  • if I want to edit on my Palm Pilot, I'd end up doing so in raw HTML, not Structured Text

  • I can't write lots of interrelated chunks, like in Wiki.

Pet Peeve alert... it's Microsoft, not Microsoft. thx

• reply: torqued the name for Wiki Name purposes, much like Zope. I'd rather mess with capitalization than put things in brackets. --BillSeitz