For what it's worth, "Home Grown" might not be the best phrase but all in all I have switched off of Mango Blog and settled for a bundled application I whipped up over the last 2 weeks. When I first truly started this blog back in April, I had intentions to go with a custom concept; however, between lack of time and no direction with how I was going to put it out, I lost drive and let it go. After redesigning a long-time client's site to run on top of Sean Corfield's Framework One, I suddenly saw a new direction and went with FW/1 as my medium which snowballed into what I have now.
I enjoyed using Mango Blog and it was a good start to getting a feel for things. There are definitely a lot of cool features; not to mention a fair share of plugins to fill in the gaps. It was easy to get started with everything from install to publish and applying your own layout as a skin is not difficult at all. From a blogging perspective it seems ideal to me and the page creation is excellent for general content; though I didn't really make too many pages. I started to get hung up though with trying to incorporate other dynamic content. Part of this issue I'm sure is merely my lack of knowledge to the platform.
I like to build things where I have full flexibility in control when a project is my own and not for a client. Quite often that means I reinvent the wheel in many areas. It's that flexibility sometimes that's needed to push forward even if it takes me a little extra time. There are plenty of areas where it's not wise and you're better off going with the tried and true; but in this case it makes no difference obviously when it's simply a blog with dynamic pages running along side. It's an image and I get to build that image from the ground up.
With Framework One as a base I have been able to shape everything to where it flows nicely between logic and feature. So far I've recreated some of the features that I was using previously. Right now I have my articles, their comments, the ability to post comments and subscribe/unsubscribe to them, a view counter, tags and RSS. Things like archives and linking the tags etc. will come about as I have time. Not to mention any bugs I run in to.
It's been a good learning experience. Now I just need to get back to blogging on something more topic-worthy.
Cheers.