[Update May 25, 2018
With the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for european countries, we have deactivated the comment system described in this article. Nevertheless, the causalities and thought processes described in this article remain valid. We regret very much that we cannot use this product combination, which we consider to be good, until further notice.]

We dedicate an article to the selection process of the blog software we use. Why?

Because we were in the need to find a suitable blog system for ourselves that suits our expectations and we want to share our experiences, hoping that it will be of general use!

What was our initial situation? We wanted to integrate a self-sufficient blog system into our website because the resources we used did not provide that.
Our market research showed that there are only a few pure blog systems. The vast majority of providers offer CMS systems with more or less distinct blogging functionalities.

However, the new blog system was not allowed to dominate our recent web presence, i. e. to impose us a primary system into which we would have to integrate our existing pages. It had to subordinate itself as quietly as possible.
This eliminated most of the well-known CMS systems from the outset.

The next decision level concerned the resource requirements of the future blog system. Although we use databases on our website, we wanted to relinquish the setup, maintenance and maintenance/data backup of another database.

A new trend in the CMS market, so-called' Flat File CMS', met our needs. It refers to CMS that work without database and store all their content in files.

This has the disadvantage of increased administration overhead for the web server, as directories must be set up that have a public user write permissions . But this only affects the system's setup and is not relevant to ongoing operation.

Advantageous is that the whole topic of the database setup is omitted and a relocation of the blog system is much easier to accomplish.
Another advantage is the easy to manage parallel operation of several blog systems within the same web presence, e. g. for the presentation in several languages.
The performance of a file-based blog system is perfectly adequate for systems up to medium size.

After the rather' hard' selection criteria we continued to deal with the' soft' criteria:

• How old is the last version of the blog system?
• Is the blog system still maintained? If not, the system is excluded from consideration!
• Is the permission and the technical possibilities given for individual adaptation to the own web presence?
• Is the presentation of the content of the blog system appealing or rather' old fashioned'?
• Does the blog system provide the functionality we want?
• Is the blog system written in a programming language that we already use?

With these criteria we scoured our preselection again and decided for ...Bludit.

This CMS meets almost all of our criteria - except for one thing:
It does not offer complete blog functionality according to our requirements! There is no management of comments on blog posts!
Now we had a problem with this, because of course we like to get in dialogue with interested people and our product users via blogs.

So what to do?

Revoking the product decision and try to find another suitable product?
Or did we have other options to get out of this dilemma?

Rather out of desperation and without conviction to find our missing piece of the puzzle, we searched for a pure commentary system - and found what we were looking for!
In addition to the established - and often criticized for questionable data protection - providers, a small number of independent commentary systems have emerged that work without a database. And with Hashover we found a suitable solution for us!

It is also adaptable to an existing web presence, is not a data sucker and fulfils all the other criteria we provide!

The commenting system is integrated into the blog system with a few lines of code. You can see the overall result right now!

If you would like to know more about this, please contact us.