Review: Cutenews

Unless you’ve been living with your head under a figurative e-rock, you’ll know that Cutenews is a relatively small blog/update system. You’ve also probably heard that Cutenews is unsafe and lacks many features of a quality script. On the other hand, you may have heard that Cutenews is amazing; you might even use it yourself. But what exactly is so good/bad about Cutenews?

What’s so great about it?

Cutenews is a blog system that runs purely off flat text files, which makes it relatively unique in the world of blogging scripts. It doesn’t require MySQL databases to use, which can be a blessing if you’re running your website off of a free host. You can also customize your blog’s template, and it fits right in with your website’s layout: just copy and paste the display code. Little could be easier. In addition, a nice feature for commenters is that they can register with your site and reserve their commenting names so that no one else can use them.

But really. It’s not that great.

Cutenews is an old, out-of date script. It’s original developer has even dropped support for it and is no longer updating it, which means that the current Cutenews script is years old. It’s easily hacked and spammed, and although I have no personal experience with either of these under Cutenews, I’ve heard horror stories. If you use Cutenews, you put your blog at risk.

Truthfully, even the features that Cutenews offers aren’t that great. The archive system is sub-par; when I was using Cutenews I had trouble finding out how to display my own archives (and I’m supposed to be intelligent). The customizable template uses deprecated presentational HTML rather than a stylesheet, and it takes a lot of work to get a stylesheet set up to go with your Cutenews installation and get rid of the presentational tags (I know, I’ve tried). Most of the other features it offers can be found on even the most basic of other blogging systems. It’s not even as though the MySQL is even much of a problem anymore. There are tons of free hosts that DO offer MySQL, and many of the ones that don’t, like webs.com (bleh), don’t offer PHP support either, which means Cutenews isn’t an option.

All in all, skip the Cutenews. It’s not a great blogging system; it’s out of date and frustratingly simplistic. There are tons of better scripts out there for your use- if you want something big, you can try the immensely popular WordPress, or, if you’re looking for a similar, easy to embed script, Fanupdate might be the script for you.