Why is it that Atlassian does not eat their own dog food, so to speak?

Specifically, it would appear that Atlassian is using Movable Type for their blogging instead of the blogging features of Confluence.

I, and others I'm sure, are looking to evaluate Confluence for both its Blogging _and_ Wiki capabilities. Our first option right now is to use the new WSS 3.0 from Microsoft, since it offers both of these in a single package.

However, I would rather go with something that has more features and capabilities, if I could find a single solution for both needs.

It is hard to glean from Confluence's feature set, but digging around in the JIRA notes seems to indicate that Confluence has blog publishing capabilities. So, the question for me is, why the heck isn't Atlassian using their own product for their blogs?!

I'm hoping this is just an embarrassing oversight. But it is a terrible marketing blunder nevertheless. I'm hoping to see a nice Atlassian blog conversion here in the next week or so! ;)

-Jonathan

My thoughts exactly... We are trying to evaluate Confluence for its Blogging features... Are they that complicated that a simple blog wont be able to handle it? Please let us know

Hi Guys,

When we first set up these blogs several years ago, we elected not to use the built-in Confluence blogs for two reasons:

1. Confluence didn't have any spam-prevention features


2. It was somewhat harder to customize the design of the site to match exactly what we wanted for the blog (that is, to have it match http://www.atlassian.com very closely).

In the intervening few years, we have largely addressed those shortcomings. Confluence now has spam-prevention features built-in, and we have a theme that matches our existing website. At this point, it is mostly a matter of resources. As a small company, we just haven't had time to swap out MT, which works well enough, for Confluence. However, there is no reason we couldn't do so, and it should not be construed as an indictment of Confluence's blogging features.

As a a matter of fact, every person in the company has an Confluence internal blog attached to their personal space, most of which are used almost daily. We find that it works incredibly well. In fact, it's one of our most valuable uses of Confluence.

I'm part of the Atlassian Custom Plugin Pack team. Just to offer an example I've used Confluence for my own personal blog for over a year. For me it was the easiest thing to set up. I enjoy the ability to leverage the WYSIWIG editor and/or wiki markup which I'm already familiar with.

Here is a link: http://tinyurl.com/yqhk5v

Hopefully you'll find that to be a helpful quick example to glance at.

I'm not trying to plug my own blog here (I have no delusions around the limited target audience for the subject matter......well OK maybe just a couple delusions :)

I hate excuses like:

"As a small company, we just haven't had time to swap out MT, which works well enough, for Confluence."

It's time for companies like Atlassian to eat their own dogfood (especially Java companies) - it's so tiresome to see the meta excuses about things like this over and over in the community. What it really boils down to is "our product is so simple and makes you so productive, that we can't even use it ourselves."

Anyway, I look forward to seeing the atlassian crowd at the upcoming A.H. 2007 conference: http://www.bileblog.org/?p=326

No offense Rick but you're way off-base. I work for a small company and you have to choose your battles wisely. Atlassian uses Jira and Confluence for everything else they do. They are eating their own dog food. What platform they use for their blogs should be the last of our worries. As a Jira/Confluence user at work I'd rather the time be spent working on Jira and Confluence. They need to spend time on things like fixing the issue of needing unique page names within a space and not waste it on changing their blogging platform.

Wow, Rick. What vitriol.

I think you missed the part where every Atlassian employee has an internal blog powered by Confluence. These blogs form the main channel for inter-team communication within the company, and are vital to both the way we do business, and to Atlassian's corporate culture. Two thirds of the posts that make it to the Atlassian developer blog start off in our internal blogging system.

We eat our dog food. Every Atlassian employee uses Confluence every day. I know this, because I'm the guy they yell at when it breaks. :)

Part of being a good engineer is choosing the best tool for the job. As Jonathan said above, when we were starting off blogs.atlassian.com, we decided that Moveable Type was best suited to what we needed from this site. If we were setting up this site anew today, I, as Confluence lead developer, would recommend... Wordpress.

(Yes, I know Jonathan said otherwise. We don't require uniformity of opinion at Atlassian)

Confluence is the best tool for running our intranet and internal blogs, because of the integration of wikis and blogs, the advanced user/permission management, the fact we can just point someone at their intranet account and say "create your personal space", and all their blog posts will show up on the company feed, and all the other tools and features Confluence provides for gathering, sharing, collaborating and disseminating. That doesn't necessarily make it the best tool for running blogs.atlassian.com.

Moveable Type and Wordpress are both fantastic products, if you're looking for something to run a public blogging site with no extra functionality. We're not writing dedicated blogging software, we're writing wiki/collaboration software. Blogging is one feature of Confluence, but because it is not the main focus, competing directly with MT and WP isn't a productive use of our time.

Since anyone can add comments... Of course I did not write the above. My opinions are not usually that strong. When I am angry, I tend to mumble to myself, not post on someone elses blog.