Bert JW Regeer

Chyrp is a new web-logging engine, which showed a lot of promise early on, with it's extensible framework, triggers all over the place and easy to theme.

However I have found that it also has many flaws in the way it handles data, the way it does things. I have filed bug reports about two so far. While it has great potential, I really think it needs to overcome some of the main limitations, and one of those I have found is documentation and code readability. It took me a good hour or so to figure out where a feather was being triggered, and how that would affect the out-come of certain actions. Then I traced down that the feather submits the data to a YaML engine which parses it, and strips out the extra spaces I needed for what I needed it to work for to work.

The theme-ing is done using standard HTML with PHP thrown in, which gets eval()'ed, or so I am guessing. I did not look much into it, all in all it seems like a blogging engine that was thrown together, certain parts were thought out, others were just ignored completely or forgotten. I think Chyrp is going to go far, but not until some of the major parts of it are re-written and fixed.

I was looking forward to using something a lot more lightweight from the Drupal I am currently using, but as of right now none of the blogging engines that exist have caught my fancy. Chyrp was a shoe-in for the position mainly because it is small, and pretty lightweight, but after looking at it for a bit longer it started showing bigger and bigger cracks.

Chyrp has potential, and I fully expect it to become one of the better blogging engines, but it needs some serious time love and care.