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Beyond Wordpress, perhaps you should also consider looking at Drupal which is also GPL?

Specifically, my Drupal4Bloggers project is to recreate all the features that MT users are used to in Drupal. Comment spams and the constant need for rebuild after spam attacks is the main reason that drive me away from MT and to start the project.

It is pretty stable now and has all the anti-comment spams features I build for MT plugins (e.g. the popular captcha plugin mt-scode). It also has moderation features Wordpress users are used to. Work is underway to build anti-Trackback spams.

Specifically, my Drupal4Bloggers project is to recreate all the features that MT users are used to in Drupal. Comment spams and the constant need for rebuild after spam attacks is the main reason that drive me away from MT and to start the project. It is pretty stable now and has all the anti-comment spams features I build for MT plugins (e.g. the popular captcha plugin mt-scode). It also has moderation features Wordpress users are used to. Work is underway to build anti-Trackback spams.

Yes, PHPNuke and PostNuke both have had a bad reputation for security exploits. A better alternative is Xoops which is also a Nuke derivative but better managed and coded (not to say that it is perfect).

Of the non-Nuke portals I would say that Drupal seems to be one of the most well coded engines. Xaraya is also probably worth a look to but I have not used that one.

First off, you say three and name four. You must be a project manager. ;-)

Secondly, if you can ignore WYSIWYG (please, what is 'preview' mode for?) then check out drupal. Small, tight, easy to configure, treelike structure. You'll spend more time trying to figure out your categories than you will doing other crap to get it rocking.
Themes are light and largely CSS based.

It's a freaking security nightmare.
Once you get on the defacement lists, expect to get hit with every new 'sploit as soon as they're out. Francisco Burzi may be a nice guy, but he doesn't know shit about coding secure PHP. If you're going to run it, you'll at least need one of the secure releases or better yet...

Use drupal. Very solid, safe, secure and easily configurable. The toughest bit is figuring out taxonomy or categories that the various entries (blogs, forum topics, stories, etc.) adhere to. These things are all 'nodes', btw. But once you have your categories down, you're done.

You can even search for a script to do the conversion from phpNuke to drupal, and no drupal doesn't require any special directories. Give it a whirl.

And if folks are whoring sites, then I'll whore mine.
Brew-Masters
I have the throttle hooked up, so hopefully it won't get slashdotted, but then it doesn't look like this thread is getting a lot of comments.

"If you're looking for a PHP alternative, Drupal is as close as it gets. (www.drupal.org)"

You can use Drupal to convert entire essays/books into s5 presentations on the fly.

Example: Standard content in CMS view
Standard content in s5 presentation view

If you are using Drupal as a CMS, then HTMLArea is available as an add-on module. You can also check the demo.

While Drupal is not a Wiki per se, it shows the potential for HTMLArea. I use it on my web sites, and it is a real time saver.

Drupal has some wiki add on modules, but I have not tried any of those recently.

If you are using Drupal as a CMS, then HTMLArea is available as an add-on module. You can also check the demo.

While Drupal is not a Wiki per se, it shows the potential for HTMLArea. I use it on my web sites, and it is a real time saver.

Drupal has some wiki add on modules, but I have not tried any of those recently.

Except that Slashcode produces horribly invalide HTML. Please use something well designed. Try:
Drupal
Plone
or Xaraya

PHP-Nuke was pretty rife with exploits and although PostNuke tried to do better it still wound up with a few exploits. However some of the other Nuke forks are quite good. I am partial to Xoops. Another similar system that is much better designed than the Nukes is Drupal.

This is not suprising given the fact that the site runs on CivicSpace.
This is the funded continuation of DeanSpace, the Drupal-based grassroots campaigning software created for and used in Howard Dean's campaign.

And it's all open-source too.

The myriads of hackers on KDE and GNOME applications. I'm particularly fond of Kate, KDE's text editor, which is also a component in many other KDE applications.

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the original wiki idea, and Clifford Adams, the maintainer of one of the first usable wiki engines, UsemodWiki.

Rusty Foster, Dries Buytaert and Rob Malda, who created Scoop, Drupal and Slash, respectively, three very powerful weblog engines I use every day.

Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis for starting the GIMP. Ton Rosendaal and the rest of the Blender team for proving that proprietary applications can become open source through distributed funding.

Anthony Jones, creator of iRATE, for exploring new ways to discover free music.

Dave Winer of UserLand for developing a simple content syndication format (now RSS 2.0), the MetaWeblog API and the XML-RPC protocol.

Keith Packard of HP for his many improvements to X.

Guido van Rossum for creating Python, Larry Wall for creating Perl and the many people involved in making PHP, and making it useful.

And of course, the many other people involved in all of these programs, and those who built the software infrastructure that made them possible.

You'd think that a geek CMS system would recognize the importance of being standards compliant.

Unfortunately /. isn't alone in using invalid and outdated code. Both Kuro5hin (scoop) and Metafilter crap out too.

I'm not in any way related to them, but Drupal not only validates, but is XTML 1.0 Strict!

Check out Drupal. It has a cache feature to help out in case of slashdottings.
I have not RT'd the FA, but if you're stuff is PHP based, check out Phunami. I came across that one a few days ago and it looked pretty interesting... Caches pages depending on referer.

Cheers!

This was a no-brainer to get installed, and has probably the MOST configurable system (Zope) as a CMF support below it:

It runs on python and ZODB (A true OO DB)

Check it out

(The difficult part is learning to use Zope)

I've also tried out Drupal ... It seems a bit more than a common blog and can suit most needs. (Uses PHP/MySQL)

Take a look at Drupal.

It has two features that could be helpful to you:

• Book nodes: which provide automatic navigation to chapters/pages of a book.
• Flex node module: which allows you to define custom nodes with custom fields (so you could add date written, blah)

It is a very capable CMS system, and I highly recommend it.

That's odd, since Drupal is a strong contender in the arena of blogger software. Technically it's more than just a blogger, but it's still a full-featured blogging software.

Yes, there are options, but not having to rely upon an outside service for updating the content in your blog or gallery is what MovableType provides.

I agree that MovableType (and sixapart) should have the right to charge for their program. But going from free to crippled 70-600 dollar licenses is a bit of a shock to those of us who didn't see this coming.

Blogger or livejournal, etc are of course for people who don't want to get their hands dirty with setup and maintenance. It's a great service. But what happens if the service goes belly-up? Think mp3.com and the artists. While there's a great deal of minless drivel on many blogs, still others provide witty, insightful, funny, local, or even newsworthy content.

It's a shame that MovableType has deliberately alienated their community support and likely will end their own dominance over the weblog content management software.

For people starting out on weblogging, I agree that multiply, blogger, livejournal, or some such service is definitely worth a look.

For those of you already using MT and looking for alternatives, the ones that have been commonly mentioned in the past day may be worth checking out. For example, TextPattern, Drupal or Wordpress.

Don't like the free alternatives? MT's success came from community support. Do the same thing for these. Test them, report bugs, develop them, use them. Show MT that they're not the only game in town, just one of the most expensive.

Just use Drupal instead. Free, powerful, extensible... Oh, and the blogger stuff is just a part of it, it's actually a lot more than that (kinda like a software to build Slashdot type of sites).
I installed it on my server and dumbed it down so only the blog is active, and it's working great.

A merit of http://www.opensourcecms.com/ is the
categorization : it's important to distinguish generic ("portal") CMSs from just weblogs engines,
and other variants. Though -of course- there's no clear cut-off.

I've been making some research recently.
I wanted an open weblog engine (perhaps with some light cms features), in php+mysql (for ubiquitousness), with good internals (decent code and developer docs).

Among the heavyweigth CMSs -escaping from the horrible mess of PhpNuke and sons- I looked at Mambo, Xaraya and XOOPS ; all of them are really interesting; but too complex beasts for my needs.

Drupal (a generic CMS with weblog included) deserves consideration: nice developer docs, carefully organized coding base and very active. But I dont like the concepts it uses ("nodes","taxonomy"), the templating strategy and the focus in general (a CMS too abstract, I feel).

On the other side, on the KISS weblogs engines, Wordpress has gained a lot of attention. And I liked it overall.
BUT: the code is rather immature and poorly organized and the docs are terrible. Lots of poor software design choices, both at maintainability and performance aspects(yes, guys; I know it's just PHP, but even then... lots of globals, nearly no classes, plugins bad integrated, etc)

I finally choose Nucleus. It beats WP largely in software design and documentation. A minus: it's weak activity (compared with wp and others): a year from the last stable release (2.0). But it's alive, has a decent forum, 3.0RC released this month; and going in the good direction IMHO.

I'm new to blogging and group/forum CMS systems, so forgive my n00b-idity.

In terms of features and target implementation, how do WordPress and MT stack up against stuff like PhpNuke, Drupal and Plone? Don't they all do basically the same thing?

I've tried a few CMS and read about many. Obviously some are more suitable than others for certain situations. Drupal has been perfect for running my two sites. One has a book and news stories while the other is purely a blog. Drupal's online documentation is very good and the community is very very helpful with users. I highly recommend it.

b2evo This is what I would recommend people check out first.
BBlog (requires PHP version 4.1 or greater & MySQL version 3.23 or greater)
Bit 5 Blog
blosxom (only need ability to run CGI scripts)
drupal.org (mySQL or similar required)
LiveJournal.org
MyPHPblog/Simplog (seems to require MySQL would have to download to be sure.)
Nucleus (requires PHP version 4.0.6 or higher and access to a MySQL database version 3.23.38 or higher)
Pivot (only php required)
pLog (requires PHP 4.1.x or higher and MySQL 3.1.x or higher)
Scoop (requires Apache with mod_perl and mySQL)
TikiWiki (requires PHP 4.1+ and MySQL. Very powerful software.)
WordPress (requires PHP version 4.1 or greater and MySQL version 3.23.23 or greater.)

hehe not sure if we'll have enough readership to cause slashdot effects.
I'd use drupal though if I was to make one

Plone is not the only one open source CMS around. Tikiwiki, Typo3,Drupal and a lot more are open source, some even with commercial support (i.e. Typo3, comparing with it could be a bit more fair) if eWeek want that "feature" over every other possible functionality they could have.

Skip the *nuke open source content management systems (i.e. postnuke, phpnuke, etc.) and try Drupal. More secure, less buggy, easier to develop on.

Or, better yet, use the great research already done at http://www.opensourcecms.com/

There's a drupal module that does that. Coded by kerneltrap webmaster.

Drupal is worth looking at.

Or, if you need a technical support forum, perhaps it would be better to adapt something like Double-Choco-Latte (DCL) to your needs?

Check out Drupal. Although primarily developed for MySQL, it does work with PostgreSQL.

The new site seems to be broken, you can't read the comments. The URLs (eg http://www.linuxgazette.com//131#131) go nowhere, and the expand/flatten/whatever the comment tree buttons do nothing (I reckon I'm in caching/cookie hell here but its exactly the same in both IE6 and Moz1.5). After figuring out that the site uses drupal as its CMS, I realized the URLs should be, e.g.

http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/view/134/131#13 1

(for a comment on node 134). Looks like their URL rewriting is screwy. Anyway, hope this helps folk who wanted to read the site when it comes back up, seems /.ed right now.

Okey, lets post the correct link here, so we can help /.'ing it a bit.

drupal.org

I have a question both to the AC who posted the original remark and to the hapless moderator who rated it as insightful: how does one assess the completeness of an idiot?

Drupal has had a book module in the core distribution for atleast a year. In drupal terms, this allows you to author any node (blog entry, forum post, image , story etc.) and attach it in relation to the book. (based on taxonomy). Each of these pages has revision control and can optionally go into the submission queue. It is possible to set it up even more extensively ... whereby you can use the groups module to give certain users different rights depending on which topic they are editing etc.

Some Examples :

• Drupal Handbook.
• ENC 1101-B3 & B4: Writing for Discovery.

Drupal is an incredibly well thought out content management framework that aims to be as extensible as possible. I use drupal to run several of my personal sites , and have been using drupal for more than a year now. The deanspace campaign makes use of it, aswell as several large websites such as kerneltrap and debianplanet

Drupal.

Drupal offers a good solution because it can require logons for comments etc... Other solutions are trying to integrate BBS systems like YABBSE with Blogs - they are giving that a try at the agonist and it works quite well and helps to build a community.

"if only PHP-Nuke was on the list - it's what has revolutionalised my life as a webmaster!!"

Funny that out of the countless open source cms projects, only plone was included in the list.

Meanwhile, my vote would go for Drupal!

DeanSpace development comunity - Website : http://DeanSpace.org
Articles: http://drupal.org/node/view/2267
Wired News http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59497,00 .html
Dan Gillmore http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/650 1101.htm
Reason Online http://www.reason.com/links/links081303.shtml
Hesie Online (german) http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/jk-26.08.03-00 1/

Albeit slowly. It is much faster for anonymous users as the pages are being cached.

Drupal runs some other very big sites like kerneltrap.org and debianplanet.org.Drupal rocks.

I have been using it for more than a year, and it is very very modular (actually, i was doing drupal development when i got the mail saying we'd been slashdotted. )

Drupal features a great caching engine , aswell as an auto throttling module, which counts how many hits the site has had in the last few minutes and ups the amount of caching that happens. (among other things). It is possible to tune drupal to be a very resillient high traffic website .. but this sadly takes some experience in the matters.

Drupal has also been notibly used for entire classes as a teaching aid.

Some other drupal features

Oh .. and it can do everything from run a development site to a personal weblog (mine. heh)

Albeit slowly. It is much faster for anonymous users as the pages are being cached.

Drupal runs some other very big sites like kerneltrap.org and debianplanet.org.Drupal rocks.

I have been using it for more than a year, and it is very very modular (actually, i was doing drupal development when i got the mail saying we'd been slashdotted. )

Drupal features a great caching engine , aswell as an auto throttling module, which counts how many hits the site has had in the last few minutes and ups the amount of caching that happens. (among other things). It is possible to tune drupal to be a very resillient high traffic website .. but this sadly takes some experience in the matters.

Drupal has also been notibly used for entire classes as a teaching aid.

Some other drupal features

Oh .. and it can do everything from run a development site to a personal weblog (mine. heh)

Albeit slowly. It is much faster for anonymous users as the pages are being cached.

Drupal runs some other very big sites like kerneltrap.org and debianplanet.org.Drupal rocks.

I have been using it for more than a year, and it is very very modular (actually, i was doing drupal development when i got the mail saying we'd been slashdotted. )

Drupal features a great caching engine , aswell as an auto throttling module, which counts how many hits the site has had in the last few minutes and ups the amount of caching that happens. (among other things). It is possible to tune drupal to be a very resillient high traffic website .. but this sadly takes some experience in the matters.

Drupal has also been notibly used for entire classes as a teaching aid.

Some other drupal features

Oh .. and it can do everything from run a development site to a personal weblog (mine. heh)

If you go to the Drupal website, you'll see that Brad posted some brief comments from his interaction with the Dean campaign (9/10/2003).

(Taken from Drupal.org)

I met with a Presidential campaign yesterday. They asked me to advise in general on their web site, but when we got into our discussion, I learned they were doing the static html thing. So, I demoed three CMS' to them - Drupal, Typo3, and a fork of Backend my company developed. They were blown away by all of them,. But I steered them to Drupal for speed of setup, flexibility and features. As a matter of fact, if you compare the features to what Howard Dean has on his site, you are basically setup with everything he has.

Having managed campaigns for a living in a previous life, I realized that if a Presidential campaign is this far behind technologically, then there are likely hundreds of candidates running now and next year that will not have a system in place. Additionally, most do not have the budget of this campaign and are unable to hire developers, designers, and writers, but know it is necessary.

Regardless, it is quite impressive to see an open project get this kind of press (Presidential campaigns?), and the modifications given back to the community?! Ye gods! w00t!

...for a geek. It's what I run my blog on, and so far it's far easier to customize than Movable Type ever was for me.

Check out drupal.org. It has the ability, if desired, to have separate blogs for each student. Also a "book" format for collaboration. And even a separate forum. And static pages as well. Very nice. Students can even learn the meaning of taxonomy! ;->

[disclaimer: I'm a Drupal contributor]
Drupal is a CMS which doesn't use the OO features of PHP, but has nonetheless an OO design: for example all content is a "node", and you can "subclass" a node getting a story, an image, a forum topic etc.
It uses hooks so it can be expanded easily; it has both themes a-la *nuke and templates. Of course it has a good user management system.
The core is maintained by few people (not me) in a very strict, almost maniacal ;) cleanliness.
It's fast and powers sites like Kerneltrap which sometimes is on /. home and withstands the load. I use Drupal to power different sites, from personal blogs to corporate intranets, and plan to use it as a base for other completely different projects.
It also has a very active community.
Of course it has its own faults and deficiencies, but we are working to fix them.
Here is a recent review of Drupal.

Drupal seems to have all the features of Slash and Scoop plus more. And you only need PHP & MySQL support, so it will run even on a Windoze box.

Or Drupal, a superior tool IMHO.

The "throttle" module you refer to is a mechanism to detect surges in traffic, and to allow other modules to thus intelligently and automatically react. For example, the "statistics" module will automatically stop some of its logging and statistical analysis during heavy loads. In any case, this is new to Drupal, to be released with 4.1 (otherwise currently available in the development version from CVS). I hope in time other modules will utilize this logic. (I.E., themes could automatically become simpler under heavy loads, fancy features requiring lots of CPU could be temporarily disabled or reduced, etc) For more information read the help page.

I have written another module, called "filecache" which does what you have described. That is, it simply caches pages to the filesystem. If Slashdot results in MySQL choking, the site will continue to function thanks to the static cache files, automatically resuming dynamic generation after the rush is past and MySQL is able to respond to queries again. The module and patches to Drupal can be viewed here. I'm adding some more features to this module, but the core is done and seems to work quite nicely. (Additionally, with pages cached to the file-system I'm seeing a significant performance boost)

Drupal is an excellent engine, very modular in design and easy to work with. More, it's backed by a team of friendly and helpful developers. I made the switch after performance issues with PHP-Nuke, and I've not looked back. And it just keeps getting better...

-Jeremy

The "throttle" module you refer to is a mechanism to detect surges in traffic, and to allow other modules to thus intelligently and automatically react. For example, the "statistics" module will automatically stop some of its logging and statistical analysis during heavy loads. In any case, this is new to Drupal, to be released with 4.1 (otherwise currently available in the development version from CVS). I hope in time other modules will utilize this logic. (I.E., themes could automatically become simpler under heavy loads, fancy features requiring lots of CPU could be temporarily disabled or reduced, etc) For more information read the help page.

I have written another module, called "filecache" which does what you have described. That is, it simply caches pages to the filesystem. If Slashdot results in MySQL choking, the site will continue to function thanks to the static cache files, automatically resuming dynamic generation after the rush is past and MySQL is able to respond to queries again. The module and patches to Drupal can be viewed here. I'm adding some more features to this module, but the core is done and seems to work quite nicely. (Additionally, with pages cached to the file-system I'm seeing a significant performance boost)

Drupal is an excellent engine, very modular in design and easy to work with. More, it's backed by a team of friendly and helpful developers. I made the switch after performance issues with PHP-Nuke, and I've not looked back. And it just keeps getting better...

-Jeremy

The "throttle" module you refer to is a mechanism to detect surges in traffic, and to allow other modules to thus intelligently and automatically react. For example, the "statistics" module will automatically stop some of its logging and statistical analysis during heavy loads. In any case, this is new to Drupal, to be released with 4.1 (otherwise currently available in the development version from CVS). I hope in time other modules will utilize this logic. (I.E., themes could automatically become simpler under heavy loads, fancy features requiring lots of CPU could be temporarily disabled or reduced, etc) For more information read the help page.

I have written another module, called "filecache" which does what you have described. That is, it simply caches pages to the filesystem. If Slashdot results in MySQL choking, the site will continue to function thanks to the static cache files, automatically resuming dynamic generation after the rush is past and MySQL is able to respond to queries again. The module and patches to Drupal can be viewed here. I'm adding some more features to this module, but the core is done and seems to work quite nicely. (Additionally, with pages cached to the file-system I'm seeing a significant performance boost)

Drupal is an excellent engine, very modular in design and easy to work with. More, it's backed by a team of friendly and helpful developers. I made the switch after performance issues with PHP-Nuke, and I've not looked back. And it just keeps getting better...

-Jeremy