Before I begin this rant, I want to clarify that Cutenews is not banned on this domain. You can use it all you like. I just strongly dislike it and prefer that people use other scripts to blog with instead (if you’re on my site or not, my opinion is the same)
I’m not going to scold anyone for using Cutenews, I used it for a long time before I moved to CutenewsRU then finally to WordPress. I can understand how WordPress seems really scary and bloated and "Omg I have no idea what I’m doing". I didn’t have a clue either.
But you need to try. Take baby steps. I’ve learned to fall in love with WordPress and I really can’t see myself using anything else now.
Cutenews is old. It hasn’t been updated in almost two years. Flexer (the guy who wrote the script) pretty much stopped development once he released his license policy and swore people would pay for an unsafe script.
Security exploits have been plugged but technology (and the coding involved) changes rapidly. I personally don’t feel safe using Cutenews as my blog / news script.
May I suggest an alternative?
PHP FanUpdate is similar to Cutenews in the way that it’s small and easy to install and integrate into pages. It was made for keeping a news page for updated fanlistings but you can easily use it for maintaining your website. I’ve used this personally for my defunct RPG development blog and thought it was very easy and to the point. In fact, every single page on that RPG blog was maintained by PHP FanUpdate, even the content pages.
Plus, it’s much more secure. It was last updated in November 2007.
I just thought I should put my opinion out there. This isn’t a post directly talking to hostees so if you’re using Cutenews and think I’m scolding you, I’m not. I really wish no one in the whole world were using Cutenews but the fact remains that people still do (I’ve seen at least ten websites today using it).
Later on I’ll be talking about more scripts like this. Because I’m a dork and I love playing with scripts.