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Using Mura as a Blogging Platform

I have been watching and occasionally playing around with Mura since its initial announcement.  Most of my previous trials had been quick, without any serious look into it replacing my install of Mango blog.  However, as I continued to add additional content to my site it became clear that I needed a full CMS.  Mango is awesome for just a blog, but to integrate some projects into it would have taken more time then I have, so I started migrating to Mura.

First Steps

Obviously, the first thing I had to do was to install Mura in a new site in IIS.  Thanks to the work of the developers at Blue River Interactive the install was very simple.  Rather then post install instructions, read their instructions for installation.  After installation, I created a new site from within the Mura administration section (if you only have one site you don't really have to do this, but keeping the default site clean is helpful if you mess up editing one of the core files later).  This meant that my test site would be in a sub-directory called cfexecute (more on making Mura work from the root of your site later), which was perfectly fine for testing.

Portals aka The Blog

Essentially, the entire blog section of my site is just a portal in Mura which is simply a collection of related content.  The main page of a portal itself does not have any content, instead it displays the title (and a summary if you add it) of the pages within the portal.  This did a few things for me:

• This allowed me to set the blog portal to allow comments, thanks to the good thinking on Mura's part you cannot post a comment to the portal page itself, only pages within the portal
• This allowed me to setup an external RSS feed on the portal's content (Mura calls these 'Content Collections' more later)
• This allowed me to customize the layout with with Content Objects that are slightly different than the rest of the site, which you can see below.

Content Collections

This site is actually setup with two Content Collections, the main collection is the actual RSS feed of the blog and contains up to 10,000 pages (the max Mura allows, but that would be kind of hard to hit even on a very large site).  The second collection is also of the blog, however only the two most recent posts.  This is used as a Content Object on the home page so there isn't a large white hole of nothing.

Categories

Setting up categories is somewhat odd because when you define a category it is available for use by content on the entire site and not just a specific portal.  Since I only categorize blog posts, these only get used on pages within the blog itself and one of the built in Content Objects is a list of categories and the number of pages in each.

Theme and Layout

The default theme that comes with Mura is called Merced and for now its what I've chosen to use.  It is rather simplistic from a design standpoint, but works well for my simple site and is easily customizable.  The only real changes I had to make was to remove the Mura image from the header and replace the favicon link in the code.  Additionally, I had to edit to footer to get my Google Analytics code inserted, however there is now a plugin for this.

Caching

During development I did not turn on the caching option in the Site Settings menu, however after noticing a few crashes from visitors I did and all issues were solved.  I'm convinced this was a server resource issue and not something with Mura (I have a free VPS from work that does not have many resources allocated).

Comment Spam

Make sure you go through and setup CFFormProtect (this is built into Mura), thanks to this simple add on I have been saved from cleaning tons of spam comments that always come with a new post (and in this case a new CMS as search engines indexes are updated it seems the spammers hit URLs that are new to the index).  The settings for this are in [MuraInstallDirectory] /requirements/cfformprotect/, see CFFormProtect on RiaForge for more information on configuration options.

Conclusion

I have found Mura to be a joy to work with, I ran into few issues during cut over, but these were mostly issues for me and not with Mura (setting up redirects, forgetting some one off pages I added for other uses, etc.).  The longest part was migrating content and even this did not take too long, one thing I did not move from my old Mango install was comments, I believe I could have done this by inserting them into the database manually but wanted to cut over in the few days I had off so this may happen later.