Today a Manila user e-mailed me to ask about Conversant. I haven't asked permission to post the questions but here are just my answers. You can probably deduce the questions from these ;-)

Q. ?

A. Where do I start!? Bearing in mind that I'm only skimming the surface of Conversant's capabilities in Duncan's Jotter, here are some of my opinions.

Q. ?

A. The similarity is basically skin-deep. The underlying foundations - Frontier or Radio - are similar too.

One of the best summaries can be found at http://brian.carnell.com/articles/2002/05/000025.html

Conversant was actually started before Manila. It's an entirely different architecture 'under the hood'. It is very elegant, powerful, and flexible.

Seth, and the rest of the people at Macrobyte have been actively developing Conversant. I get the impression that Manila hasn't moved on much in the past couple of years. This lack of development rankles especially for those forking out $899pa for the honour of supporting it.

Since I no longer use Manila I can't comment on its buginess. What I can say is that my Conversant-hosted site at Macrobyte seems to be pretty bug-free. When bugs are reported to the FC-Support forum, Seth et al, are very responsive and invariably fix any problems quickly. Since Conversant has been around for three years most of the bugs have been wrung out of it by now.

Q. ?

A. The main features of Conversant are covered on its site. The highlights as far as I am concerned include:

• Robust web-based interface for posting/admin
• Excellent e-mail interface that handles threading of submissions, subscriptions, etc.
• NNTP interface if you need it
• XML-RPC interface with the Blogger API as a subset
• CSS and template driven presentation
• Excellent membership options/handling
• Powerful, well thought out, plug-in architecture
• Support for https
• Integrated search engine/indexer
• Excellent API with lots of conditional macros, etc.
• Now available to third-party developers/hosters
• Works on top of Radio (the extra $40 in the pricing below)
• Lower cost of entry/ownership $499 + $40 for commercial use, $249 + $40 for academic use
• $99 + $40 for personal/development use
• Focus - MacroByte is committed to Conversant. All their efforts are poured into it.
• A really good content/group management architecture

I can't think of anything that Manila provides that isn't in Conversant. The reverse is certainly not true.