Review: Fanupdate

Fanupdate is a simple blogging system that runs off of MySQL and PHP. It’s easy to use, and has often been used as a substitute for Cutenews. In my experience, I’ve found that Fanupdate, while, like Cutenews, has its flaws, it’s overall been a much better blogging system.

Cons

Fanupdate, unlike Cutenews, does require MySQL to run. If you’re under a free host, a database might be beyond your resources, but the good news is that there are many sources of free hosting nowadays that DO provide MySQL (hey, I’m using one!), if you don’t mind taking the time to move your website.

Another problem is that I used to have a major spam problem with FanUpdate on my old website. It was partially my fault- I never enabled the system’s captcha feature, because my host didn’t support something that was required (sadly, I’m not sure exactly what it was- maybe something with .htaccess?) The good news is that spam problems should disappear with captcha enabled.

Two more slight problems with Fanupdate: first, the archiving system isn’t amazing. It’s better than Cutenews by a long stretch- you can display your archives by category- but there’s no date-order archiving system. Another problem is that the original author of the Fanupdate script seems to have abandoned it, but because of the type of copyright license that Fanupdate was published under, it’s now being redistributed through other sources. Support for the script is sadly limited, however.

Pros

On the plus side, Fanupdate is just as easy to use, if not easier, than Cutenews. It offers the same easy-to-embed copy and paste code, so that you can build a layout and then insert Fanupdate wherever you like, rather than having to work with the templating system of other CMSs (think WordPress). It also comes with its own stylesheet, so it’s easy to modify the code and make it look exactly as you like (which is important, because the original template is rather boring ugly). You don’t even have to mess around with the presentational HTML code like you would with Cutenews.

In general, if you’re looking for a lightweight, easy to use blogging script that’s more secure and better than Cutenews, Fanupdate could be right for you. It’s not exceptionally feature-heavy, but if you’re looking to save space and don’t need the flexibility of a full-fledged CMS, Fanupdate does the job fairly well.