It seems like yesterday, but it was in fact four years ago this month that I started switching over all my web sites to use Conversant. For the first five years of maintaining my web sites I just used an FTP client and then, later, Dreamweaver, both of which were very limited.
The main thing that attracted me to Conversant was that it was completely browser-based and that it was a full-fledge CMS/groupware software rather than just another blogging tool.
Four years later, Macrobyte has added a number of essential features to the system that I had no idea I even needed at the time. The single biggest was the addition of custom fields in combination with conditional macros.
As far as custom fields, a lot of blogging and other CMS software today lets users catagorize posts or stories, but I have yet to see one that does it half as cleanly as Conversant does. My animal rights site, for example, currently has almost 1,000 categories that stories and other posts can be assigned to. I’ve played around with most of the other software that other people use to manage their sites and have yet to find one that could scale categorization to that level (by the end of the year, I will have close to 3,000 categories across all of my sites).
Categorization is a good start, but Conversant’s template and conditional macro system really ties everything together and lets me do some very cool things. A lot of blog software that features categorization, for example, basically lets you categorize posts and then spits out what are essentially filtered views of the blog showing only the posts assigned to a specific category. Conversant can do that, but using templates I can output pretty much any view of the underlying posts that I want (I prefer just article titles with links such as in this page).
Conversant also lets me do a lot of things beyond simply aggregating related stories. Using conditional arguments, I can tell Conversant that if I’ve assigned Category A to a post that it should use a different stylesheet or use an entirely different template than the rest of the stories on the site.
I can also automate a lot of processes without having to run to Macrobyte with a feature request for every little thing. On some category pages, for example, I like to run right-hand sidebars with links to other sites. All I had to do for that was add a Sidebar custom field that defaults to “No.” If a category page has a Sidebar I just check “Yes”. Using a conditional macro, the site template checks this field and if it is set to “Yes” inserts the sidebar I’ve set up (I won’t go into the details about how it knows what to put in the sidebar, but it is pretty easy to implement).
All-in-all, Conversant still amazes me with the amount of power it has under the hood and how fast it runs given how much of each page is dynamically generated and some pages can have literally dozens of conditional statements that need to be evaluated in order to decide exactly which content to display.
Don’t take my word for it, though, go to Free-Conversant.Com, get a free account and kick the tires.