Weblog System Features Compared

prostoalex writes "The question of the best weblogging system out there arises quite often, especially after the new licensing scheme introduced by MovableType. Here's a rather detailed breakdown of currently popular blogging and content management systems. Out of 11 software packages, 10 run on any server with variations of Perl/PHP and MySQL/PostgresSQL, and one requires Windows and .NET Framework. 4 are licensed under GPL, 3 are under BSD. Mark Pilgrim explains why licensing is suddenly important."

Comments

Great site & Favs

[netfool]

Though it's aimed more at CMS's rather than blogs, it's definatley a great place to try out multiple CMS's before installing them.

Check it out - OpenSourceCMS

My current favorites:
Mambo
Wordpress
E107
and last but not least Geeklog

Re:Great site & Favs

[millette]

Also check out CMS Québec, the Oscom matrix and the CMS matrix - mostly for CMSes, but blogs often fit that category too.

Re:Great site & Favs

[an_mo]

shameless plug of my favorite one:
xaraya

Re:Great site & Favs

[Black Perl]

Actually, OpenSourceCMS is not a very good site. First, you can't say it's unbiased--it only has PHP. There are many great CMS apps that are not PHP. Second, what it calls CMS are in many cases actually portals or weblogs, which makes the site a bit of a misnomer.

The sites mentioned in the other responses (OSCOM and CMSMatrix) are better.

Re:Great site & Favs

[dealsites]

This is not a troll, but I've seen tons of these sites suffer from a slashdotting. Now I understand that the Slashdot crowd can deliver quite a punch, but many of these Open Source CMS systems have too many mysql database queries per page. That will reduce your capacity even further than bandwidth. Especially on a popular shared hosting plan. I'm a huge Postnuke fan and I usually have about 25 people on my site at a time (max), and one day got slashdotted. I saw the number of users grow to about 350 online at one time (based on a 5 minute interval). The page slowed down some, but I was suprised that it stayed up the whole time.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure how MANY people it actually takes to bring down a page, but this was a huge number of visitors for my site. Anyone know how many people are on Slashdot at any given time?

--
New deal processing engine online: http://www.dealsites.net/livedeals.html

Re:Great site & Favs

[Anonymous Coward]

e107? I dislike that one a lot.
* It is very unpolished.
* Requires you to write all content in full HTML
* Has no multiple language support*
* Adding new links to manu is painful
* Admin menu is cluttered and confusing.

It just loses the entire point of having a CMS: to be able to quickly and easily add content.

As for the no multiple language support, what I mean is you can only change interface language!, WHAT ON EARTH IS THE POINT OF THAT!? there is NO possible way to have content in multiple languages, but sure, you can have 'forum' on the menu appear in different languages - am I the only one who spots slight brain damage here?

Re:Great site & Favs

[DarrylM]

Heehee. From the WordPress Development Blog:

May 24, 2004
Slashdot Again
From Matt. Filed under Development.

Welcome Slashdot visitors, again. Can't you guys give us a break? ;)

You know the drill, some parts of the site will be static while the wave rides out.

:-)

Re:Great site & Favs

[smack_attack]

I've survived massive Fark traffic on my wordpress site. Then again, we also tweak MySQL where I work because the defaults are pretty retarded.

Re:Great site & Favs

[virid]

First, you can't say it's unbiased--it only has PHP.

I noticed that. I was scanning for the blog that used mysql and perl with a GPL license only to be sorely disappointed. I would have thought that would be a represented configuration.

Re:Great site & Favs

[mabinogi]

The trouble with OpenSourceCMS is that it only lists php CMSs
What I want in a CMS is both the ability to use without touching any code, and the ability to extend it. But if extending means having to touch php then I don't want to go near it.

Plone (a Python / Zope based CMS) is nearly perfect, but it's really......really......slllooow. I've been trying to find something else like it preferably Java based, but just about any language other than php would do, but I haven't had much luck.

Re:Great site & Favs

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't seem any mention of Greymatter [http://www.noahgrey.com/greysoft/], which I thought was commonly used.

Re:Great site & Favs

[Megasphaera Elsdenii]

Checking out OpenCMS, I see

All the forums are gone. Two years worth of posts gone in an instant. My backup of the database was corrupt (how's that for irony) so they're just gone forever.

Older and unsecured versions of PHP-Nuke being defaced and data manipulated via SQL injection are a fairly common occurrence. However, most of the time these people don't delete data. I'm actually shocked at the maliciousness of this attack.

This doesn't bode particularly well ...

Re:Great site & Favs

[Some Bitch]

One particular security site using Mambo a fairly regular slashdotting in it's stride. The whole DevShed network is running on Mambo as well (somewhat customised though).

Re:Great site & Favs

[Anonymous Coward]

As for the no multiple language support, what I mean is you can only change interface language!, WHAT ON EARTH IS THE POINT OF THAT!? there is NO possible way to have content in multiple languages, but sure, you can have 'forum' on the menu appear in different languages - am I the only one who spots slight brain damage here?

I'm not defending e107 here, but there's a difference between usable in any language and usable in multiple languages.

Re:Great site & Favs

[joeljkp]

Argh! My site's in Xaraya, and I dig it, but now that the site's essentially down, I can't get any work done. IRC times out, too.

On what mailing lists do you guys hang out?

Re:Great site & Favs

[bergie]

Heavy-duty Open Source CMSs like Midgard handle their DB connections in the back end instead of in PHP (or some other scripting language.

As an example, Midgard's DB connections are opened once per each Apache process instance instead of once per connection.

/Bergie

Re:Great site & Favs

[an_mo]

I think irc has been on for quite a few days ... it took a while for the dns to propagate

Re:Great site & Favs

[netfool]

Maybe I missed something, but do either of those sites offer the ability to log into each particular CMS as an administrator and try out the various functions, components, modules etc etc of each and see how changes are affected on the frontpage/rest of the website?
Sure, side by side comparisons are great, but unless the sites you mentioned actually provide a hands on experience, I can hardly think you can say "[These sites] are better.". When you buy a new car, don't you test drive it first? Or do you just base your purchase on whats listed in a brochure?

Re:Great site & Favs

[Black Perl]

Maybe I missed something, but do either of those sites offer the ability to log into each particular CMS as an administrator and try out the various functions, components, modules etc etc of each and see how changes are affected on the frontpage/rest of the website?

Of course there's something to be said about playing with GUIs, but a hosted solution can only go so far. You can't get an idea of the installation/configuration/maintenance that is associated with each product. And you don't really know if it can model your content in your environment until you try them. If it's all open source, what's stopping you from installing them yourself?

But my main beef is that, despite the name, the site is not really trying to show you open source CMS's. They're showing you a selection of PHP-based tools, some of which aren't truly CMS's, and some of which aren't even open source. Their definition of content management is very, very broad. Is a blogging tool a CMS? Is a portal a CMS? What isn't a CMS?

You see,

[Anonymous Coward]

This is proof positive that First Posters are terrorists.

You Missed the BEST CMS out there

[ScurvyDawg]

GeekLog is the best and most secure PHP CMS out there.
On top of this it is easy to use and setup.

How you missed GeekLog I will never know.

Re:You Missed the BEST CMS out there

[Anonymous Coward]

if it was the best it would be integrated already with vbulletin by someone.

Re:You Missed the BEST CMS out there

[OverlordQ]

Because he was looking for more blogish style software not a full fledged PHPNuke-look-alive.

Re:You Missed the BEST CMS out there

[Doctor Crumb]

Geeklog is great, but it is seriously lacking protection against comment spam. I've made a patch to require a delay before submitting a comment. I would love to have some other protections as well, but haven't needed to code up blacklists or anything yet. One neat suggestion was to disallow anonymous comments that had more than 2 links in them.

Re:You Missed the BEST CMS out there

[ScurvyDawg]

There are a number of ways you can deal with the comment spam. The simplest is change the word comment to something else in your language file. This makes it tough for robots to find you. Another is to install the IP Ban hack by the fellow from Pigstye.

I don't see a few comments as a serious issue when they are easily dealt with.

Within your config.php there is already the ability to have a speedlimit for comments, so I don't know why you would make a hack for it.

Re:You Missed the BEST CMS out there

[Anonymous Coward]

you turn off two switches and you have straight blog retard.

Re:You Missed the BEST CMS out there

[Doctor Crumb]

different speed limit. The existing limit applies to time between submitting different comments; my patch says that you have to wait 10(or whatever) seconds between hitting "reply to this" and hitting "submit". Same as slashdot has when you get the "slow down there cowboy!" message.

CityDesk

[tomblackwell]

You can also manage a site quite nicely with CityDesk, by Fog Creek. The owner, Joel Spolsky, is an interesting guy who has been the subject of some debate on Slashdot over the years.

Whatever your opinion of him, he makes good software.

Licenses make a difference!

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially when you are talking about FOSS software. Read here for some more reasons why licenses make a difference for authors and users alike.

my own?

[ferrocene]

Seriously, have any other /.'ers created their own system? Sure, mine sucks as I just used it to learn php, but it's still cool to programmatically create tables from a flat text file somewhere and append a date.

Re:my own?

[DrEldarion]

Why, when I was your age, we wrote static HTML pages! None of this fancy-schmancy dynamic drek! When we wanted to update our weblog we would open up the HTML file and put the text right in there! And we liked it!

Re:my own?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.angelinecms.org is my creation - i started it too to learn php but i somehow managed to do pretty decent & secure content management system. couple commercial sites too running over it :)

Re:my own?

[killdashnine]

Those of us over at ZZZ Online have been developing our own CMS after doing a similar review of popular systems. I've tinkered with LiveJournal, Moveable Type, Greymatter, and even pMachine and found each of them to be somehow lacking when you really want to make a "hands off" kind of site.

We're trying to steer away from simple blogging though as we think that collaboration reader-focused content is much more important than the mindless banter that some people like to fill their ISP's servers with.

Re:my own?

[Simon (S2)]

Seriously, have any other /.'ers created their own system?

Yes, I did. A simple gallery script I took from somewhere on the net and modified it to fit my needs. There is a cron job launching a perl script that downloads mails from a mailbox and puts the attachments on the gallery and the body of the mail under the image on the web page.
Very simple, but allows me to blog from my mobile phone.

Re:my own?

[ferrocene]

wow, that's very cool. I'm jealous! I have some work to do now!

Phone updates...*shakes head*, why didn't I think of that.

Re:my own?

[The Angry Mick]

That's nothing. Back in my day we didn't have them fancy modem thingies. We sent the site raw binary data through the telegraph. Sure it took awhile to get anything worth reading, but damn, weren't we were satisfied just knowing we'd accomplished something . . .

Re:my own?

[kfg]

And some of us ( who might have a certain infamy for not having a weblog ) are having a bit of trouble understanding why we wouldn't like doing it that way now.

Could someone please edify me (and consequently the rest of the viewing audience who might not yet have weblogs) why we might find it desirable to use dynamic methods to update and display a plain text journal?

And for us old time teletype jockeys who are jacks of all trades but masters of only vi who have never figured out what an IDE might possibly be good for, how do the benefits of weblog packages offset the disadvantages that are the raison d'etre of this Slashdot article, vis a vis, licensing issues (not to mention their attendant prices).

KFG

Re:my own?

[Tin Foil Hat]

And boy howdy! What could possibly beat the zen-like process of updating hundreds of files by hand to change one menu item?

Re:my own?

[croddy]

that's phpix, ain't it?

Re:my own?

[gravygraphics]

See blosxom... Same thing. Edit a text file and it is "published."

Re:my own?

[tweakr]

Yup, I wrote my own (as did a friend of mine) - I didn't want a lot of the extra features that most of these packages include, and I wanted to have the experience of figuring out how to do it myself.

Also, many of these packages want to be your entire site, whereas I wanted mine to be only one part (a sub-section, in fact) of the site.

All in all, it's been amusing writing my own, and I've enjoyed having the freedom of being able to tweak to my hearts content, and knowing that I can claim the fact that I've done it :P

Re:my own?

[frisket]

Which is why I now open up an XML file and put the text right in there. It gets served by Cocoon using XSLT so no-one is any the wiser. And I wrote it all myself, and it's GPL'd.

Re:my own?

[Simon (S2)]

that's phpix, ain't it?

no. i'ts all pure perl.

Re:my own?

[Hast]

Damn why didn't I think of that?

Seriously, I was considering to put together a system like this (mobile image blogging) but it allways annoyed me that sending data from a standard phone (over the telephone operators networks) is such a big bother. Furthermore I hear that many operators will perform multiple convertions of images in order to compensate for their broken software systems. (For MMS and similar services that is.)

I had even considered doing a Java program in order to transfer the data from the phone. Naturally sending a simple email is loads better.

And Doh! I just can't even express how stupid I feel for not looking for an attachment option in the email. I just tried it and it works perfectly. (Well as perfect as you'd expect from the camera on a T630, but still.) Thanks again!

Re:my own?

[TwinkieStix]

Simply put, it's more organized. It's got categories, user permissions, a web editing interface, RSS feeds, and a search engine. The search engine alone is enough when you have hundreds of entries or more and you don't want a GIANT bandwidth sucking page or you don't know the order of the words or phrases you are searching for.

Re:my own?

[crayz]

Yeah, I ran a semi-blog type thing from my site, back before I knew what a blog was. I just added text into a file, coded the formatting myself, and at the end of each month renamed the file for an archive and started a new one.

MoveableType is a radically better experience. The Luddites who are trying to say otherwise are simply wrong

Re:my own?

[LuxFX]

Seriously, have any other /.'ers created their own system?

Yes, I did, but it was before I knew anything about project management. I just kept on thinking of all of these features to put in it -- so it kept on inflating faster and faster, without any of the features getting to a 'finished' point. It turned into an incredibly complicated, and incredibly unpolished project.

Re:my own?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm writing one like Cocoon called Phpilfer (php/mysql). Like Cocoon it's got incrementally cached pipelines and url match parameters, but with transparent database caching and users/permissions, themes, which don't come with Cocoon. It's not recursive yet like Cocoon, so a pipeline can't use a stylesheet produced by another pipeline, but it's getting there.

I've done one large commercial site in Cocoon and it was a joy (well, aside from the technical problems, but the idea of Cocoon is great).

Re:my own?

[nacturation]

how do the benefits of weblog packages offset the disadvantages that are the raison d'etre of this Slashdot article, vis a vis, licensing issues (not to mention their attendant prices).

Wow, it sounds like you pulled that straight out of a Dilbert strip. Try and work in "synergistic" and "best practices" next time. :)

Re:my own?

[daaan]

dan@intermission: ~
$ cat bin/updatepage
#!/bin/bash

touch $HOME/www/content/datfiles/dan/testing ;
vim $HOME/www/content/datfiles/dan/testing ;
ispell $HOME/www/content/datfiles/dan/testing ;
cat $HOME/www/content/datfiles/dan/current > $HOME/www/content/datfiles/dan/temp ;
cat $HOME/www/content/datfiles/dan/archive >> $HOME/www/content/datfiles/dan/temp ;
mv $HOME/www/content/datfiles/dan/temp $HOME/www/content/datfiles/dan/archive ;
cat $HOME/www/content/datfiles/dan/testing > $HOME/www/content/datfiles/dan/current ;
rm $HOME/www/content/datfiles/dan/testing ;

Quick, dirty and very simple....more than enough for my needs

Re:my own?

[kfg]

Wow, it sounds like you pulled that straight out of a Dilbert strip. Try and work in "synergistic" and "best practices" next time.

For the most part I don't read Dilbert and don't work in a Dilbert like enviroment (praise the whatever).

I pulled it straight out of the universal lexicon which has been prevelant for several hundred years and thus could have pulled it straight out of Roger Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or an English translation of Voltaire. At the moment I am reading Gibbon, Umberto Eco and Sir Ricard Burton's translation of the Tales of a Thousand Nights and a Night, from which is also could have been pulled. It is the language of poetry and learned men, not the modern vulgar language of 'Corporate Speak."

I'm fairly free with the phrase "best practices." It is apt, descriptive, applicable across a broad spectrum of pursuits (you're as likely to find a carpenter or a poet using the phrase as a software engineer) and has historical standing.

I can't recall ever having used the word "synergistic" before, not even in a quote. Synergy is a perfectly good word, however. You'll find it in the Classical Greek lexicon. I am not responsible for how it is used in the vulgar.

KFG

Re:my own?

[Salamander]

Could someone please edify me (and consequently the rest of the viewing audience who might not yet have weblogs) why we might find it desirable to use dynamic methods to update and display a plain text journal?

Simple: because it's not just a plain text journal. A weblog system gives you multiple views of your entries - last N, last N in a category, everything in a certain month, RSS/ATOM views, etc. A weblog lets you post when you only have web access and not FTP, which might be the case when you're traveling and you want to send the virtual equivalent of a postcard from a kiosk somewhere (like I did from Cradle Mountain Lodge in Tasmania last year). A weblog lets your readers comment on your posts. Then there's a bunch of stuff I'm not sure I care about, like "trackback" and "pingback" and such, but the point remains that a weblog gives you a lot of functionality that static files don't. Sure, you could cut and paste between those static files, but it would be an error-prone pain in the ass and a big waste of space, and there'd still be some functionality (e.g. commenting) that you'd be missing.

In short, a weblog system doesn't have to have every stupid feature the folks in the so-called "blogosphere" dream up, but it does add value to the people who use it.

Re:my own?

[nacturation]

I pulled it straight out of the universal lexicon which has been prevelant for several hundred years and thus could have pulled it straight out of Roger Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or an English translation of Voltaire. At the moment I am reading Gibbon, Umberto Eco and Sir Ricard Burton's translation of the Tales of a Thousand Nights and a Night, from which is also could have been pulled. It is the language of poetry and learned men, not the modern vulgar language of 'Corporate Speak."

There are many learned men of today who similarly do not use that same style of language. As you allude to, in 'Corporate Speak' it's a common practice to use grandiose sounding words in a pretentious manner to hide the true meaning and make the speaker sound more intelligent than they actually are, rather than using words properly as a means of explanation. It's good to know you are well read and are writing in the classic sense -- it's quite rare these days.

Re:my own?

[harikiri]

If you have a text-based journal in a plain html file, you can easily SSH into a box and run vi/emacs/cat to update your page. However, you will miss out on some of the nicer features that come with most blogs:

• Archives: If you are regularly updating a single page, you don't want readers to have to download a big page to find just the most recent news.
• Automatic RSS feeds: I've started using RSS quite a bit recently, and it's brilliant for taking a few moments to scan many sites to see if there's anything new you want to read. Your site won't support this without extra work.
• Comments: This is mainly for those wanting to have some reader feedback, and they can grow into interesting online discussions (look at slashdot).

I recall when every man and his dog discovered geocities and created their own "websites". Due to the poor "content management" (ie, having an external html editor, ftp'ing the files to the webhost, etc). Eventually everyone that wanted a page had one, but they kinda.. didn't really get updated ... ever.

Having a blog-style site makes it easy for people to quickly add some new content to their site, with minimum fuss - as the blog software handles a lot of stuff in the background. This of course has resulted in the prevalence of shitty blogs out there today (because they're so easy to setup and use).

Re:my own?

[AJWM]

Seriously, have any other /.'ers created their own system?

Yeah, twenty years ago, in C. Some of the original sites have updated the software a bit, but the "classic" software is still in use. (I have done some work on modernizing the technology, but that got put on the back burner -- I may start it up again.)

(Some might argue that CoSy wasn't really blogging software. Well, aside from the obvious agreement that the web didn't exist then, so by definition it couldn't have been, there were several Big Names who used Byte Magazine's site (BIX) as just such -- Jerry Pournelle, for example.)

Re:my own?

[gse]

Seriously, have any other /.'ers created their own system?

I did... in about 1999 I wrote a journal-publishing system in elisp. It was pretty cool -- it had a simple language for adding entries, and it generated HTML based on templates. I used it for a long time before switching to Movable Type, and I have to say, MT is a great improvement. Hell, just having a web interface (instead of having to enter all my entries on one machine at home) is nice.

My photo pages are still generated by a similar bunch of elisp. Dunno if/when I'll replace that.

Re:my own?

[eyeye]

I have created my own in mod_perl/mysql. It has probably taken less time than it would have done to figure out how to use one of the systsems already out there. Plus I had lots of fun making it.

Re:my own?

[eyeye]

blog != CMS, I know the slashdot topic itself has blurred these two things. Bad slashdot! *smack*

My site has (IS) a CMS so I can add/change content easily needing only a web browser and so that can visitors can leave comments on articles. Its certainly not a blog though, because they suck ass.

Re:my own?

[kfg]

If you are regularly updating a single page, you don't want readers to have to download a big page to find just the most recent news.

I would simply call this "Bad site design."

KFG

Re:my own?

[kfg]

I understand that when writing in a formal style I revert to language such as might have been used during the Age of Reason. In an age where anti-intellectualism is the norm among the intellegensia I understand that some might interpret that as academic pretentiousness, and, well, I can live with that (although, while I may be a scholar, I am no academic and find true academic pretentiousness annoying).

As Eco ( a learned man if there ever was one) puts it in "The Name of the Rose":

. . .often the learned men of our time are only dwarfs on the shoulders of dwarfs.

To be accused of Corporate Speak, however, is another matter. It implies that I am a pretentious moron, and I'll take some exception to that.

KFG

Re:my own?

[frederik]

Let me suggest Blosxom to you. It's a blog system, it's file based, it's plain text, it's customizable. Perfectly well suited for someone who's a master of only vi :)

Re:my own?

[HybridJeff]

*cough* batch search and replace *cough*

Re:my own?

[nacturation]

It's certainly not pretentious if you normally write that way for formal matters. I consider it anachronistic, however, as one can always write intelligently using modern phraseology without necessarily dumbing down the content to appease the anti-intellectuals. For example, if the Age of Reason were during Shakespearean times, I would find it exceedingly odd to see someone writing using the antiquated phrases common to the period.

Re:my own?

[kfg]

Blogging--and, indeed, any online publishing-- should be as simple as typing away in your favourite text editor and hitting Save.

But that's what I already do with vi! (Well, vim actually. Ok, and it's :wq or ZZ, not "Save")

Fundamental is Blosxom's reliance upon the file system, folders and files as its content database. Entries are plain text files like any other.

But I already rely on the file system and files (and what's this "folder" of which they speak?).

The whole thing looks like a terrible bit of bloatware to me.

As for customizability, that's what I've got vi for. :)

KFG

Re:my own?

[kfg]

I consider it anachronistic. . .

I have been accused of being an anachronism and have yet to find a suitable defense to that particular charge.

There would seem, therefore, to be a reasonable chance that I am guilty.

KFG

Re:my own?

[Some Bitch]

A most amusing and interesting anachronism though, you are far and away my favourite slashdotter.

Re:my own?

[Salamander]

Seriously, have any other /.'ers created their own system?

Sure, I did. Had comments, RSS, the whole bit, but I just moved away from that and started using pMachine instead. It was great as a learning exercise, and if that's what you want it to be then more power to you, but after a while when you move onto other totally different kinds of projects it could become a bit of a millstone around your neck. At the very least I would suggest looking at the database schemas and such for some other systems that are out there, both to get ideas and to make sure that a subsequent data migration won't be too difficult.

Re:my own?

[kfg]

Thank you for your cogent answer, although it did not address my question directly, but rather its antistrophe, it proved edifying and answered at least some of my question, albeit if per speculum in aenigmate.

KFG

Let the predictable comments begin

[L. VeGas]

"The best weblogging system is one that doesn't let lame people talk about themselves. Search enginges should ignore them too."

"Hey don't be so stuck up. I blog for fun. If you don't want to read it, don't. Besides, lots of people like reading about me massaging my mom's feet."

Re:Let the predictable comments begin

[KingOfBLASH]

You forgot: "Imagine a beowolf cluster of weblogs"

Re:Let the predictable comments begin

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hey don't be so stuck up. I blog for fun. If you don't want to read it, don't. Besides, lots of people like reading about me massaging my mom's feet."
Dirty Sanchez for m'lady? g0d.org [g0d.org]

That's not even half as funny without your sig.

dancing

[millahtime]

For being a home for nerds there are a lot of products talked about with dancing names. Just look at Mambo and Samba.

Re:dancing

[carlos_benj]

Actually, an uber-geek friend of mine is into ballroom dancing. I've even met geeks who were into automechanics and sports! Egad!

Re:dancing

[Anonymous Coward]

I've even met geeks who were into automechanics and sports!

Automechanics are sexy. Who wouldn't want a lover covered in oil?

Site Mirror

[karmatic]

Although there aren't any big images, here is a mirror in case something should happen to the site:

Mirror.

Persionally, I like Serendipity - the BSD License is about as permissive as you can get.

Mod Parent Down, Link Is Offtopic

[shadowcabbit]

Leads to his Kings of Chaos recruitment page. No blogging software there at all.

Re:The Best Webloging system is slashdotted here.

[eltoyoboyo]

That $3.95 a month for 1GB of capped data transfer seemed like such a bargain at the time....

phpBB Blog and phpBB Fetch All

[Anthony Boyd]

If you run a phpBB forum, you can grab my add-on phpBB Blog to turn a forum into a blog. Also, I have a beta available of the next release. I'd love input.

Also, since this is the Open Source world where cooperation is welcomed, I thought I'd mention that phpBB Fetch All is a blog system that I didn't know about when I made phpBB Blog. phpBB Fetch All is superior to my system, although it is also bigger and more complicated. But it sure looks good.

Banned Word!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isnt Blog supposed to be one of the banned words of 2004? Yet it seems to be getting more popular, and equally more annoying.

If people want to put up the rants/raves of their daily life to make themselves feel better for the day that is fine by me, just PLEASE name it something else!!

Wordpress

[antarctican]

They're missing the one I use and love (and have no stake in, so this isn't astroturfing....), Wordpress.

http://wordpress.org/

Alas the website seems to be down right now.... but it's good, really! I've even been able to hack it a bit to use it as an entire website content management system. Example here.

Re:Wordpress

[chrisgeleven]

They aren't missing it. Scroll all the way to the right of the window and WordPress is the last on the list.

I agree with you, WordPress is by far the easiest, most expandable, and best blogging software out there. I absolutely love it.

Re:Wordpress

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you forgotten how to scroll right or does your intarweb not download enough hours for you?

Re:Wordpress

[antarctican]

My bad... ignore that... my window was too small, forgot to scroll right. ;)

Re:Wordpress

[iabervon]

If you use a piece of GPL software, you have some stake in it, if only that you probably don't want everyone else to lose interest in it while you want to keep using it. Not that there's anything wrong with this, but...

Where's e107?

[bofkentucky]

Easy to use/set-up, GPL license, and good (not perfect) XHTML strict compliance. Check it out if you have access to php/mysql

Re:Where's e107?

[eyeye]

You either are compliant with XHTML strict or you aren't, you cant be a bit compliant with it.

It doesnt validate, and it's not just comments that fail validation (which I could half understand) but the actual page structure in places.

Re:Where's e107?

[bofkentucky]

I guess I could have phrased that as "working on XHTML strict compliance", but the RE team is focused on getting fully complaint ASAP, if they can quit trying to put out fires like "online users" and comment spam.

Chart of features only

[Octagon Most]

This "rather detailed breakdown" is a nice comparison of features, but hardly answers the question of which package is the best. The chart itself says that it "displays attributes of different user-installed blog software packages side-by-side for comparison." There's nothing about usability or other subjective criteria. It is a comprehensive collection of information though. I guess that's good for some people but I bet plenty want a comparison of how easy/flexible they are to use and maintain. Personally I would also like to see a comparison to the hosted services like Blogger.

As I've said before, if accumulation of features were all that mattered, we'd all love Microsoft Office.

LiveJournal

[lostchicken]

The code that runs LiveJournal is open source. It's not that much of a pain to deploy, and when it's working, it's the most powerful I've seen. Many stand alone clients for posting, all kinds of things. Set one up, use it as your own weblog, host your friends' weblogs.

Re:LiveJournal

[Anonymous Coward]

LiveJournal is probably the easiest of all because it only takes 2 lines of code to get it embedded into your website.

Everything else is taken care of by the LJ servers.

And the interface is so much easier to use.

Re:LiveJournal

[lostchicken]

Yes, you can use the LJ servers, but what I did was actually be the LJ servers. My weblog runs the same software as they do, but I'm not tied to them in any way. Yes, it's total overkill, but I'm crazy like that.

Re:LiveJournal

[moosesocks]

Even better...

Use the LiveJournal servers, but syndicate the RSS feed into your own blog.

This way, you can get the best of both worlds, allowing you to intergrate the blog into your own site while using all of LJ's kickass features such as the huge array of WYSIWIG clients availible. It cannot be beaten.

Re:LiveJournal

[forevermore]

Livejournal may be open source, but much of what you get through their service is not part of the open source package. It also won't run under apache 2.x (yet?).

Re:LiveJournal

[abartlett_219]

LJ is one of the most powerful blogging systems out there. Fairly painless to set up (i got it working with gentoo in under an hour, debian is just apt-getting the packages and perl modules). If it can handle a 2 million+ user system (some closed source stuff, but most of that is not needed for your daily blog). And they are making tons of progress with FotoBilder, their open source photohosting service. Brad and co. has made a heck of a system Plus the LJ ethics are pretty good too (in the LJ social contract they state no ads ever!)

Re:LiveJournal

[rmarll]

Which is kind of strange since it didn't even make it into the first 10 systems reviewed.

Re:LiveJournal

[lewp]

Goddamn. That's an incredibly good idea. Wish I had mod points to give you.

Re:LiveJournal

[hackel]

Unfortunately, this only works if you pay for a $25 yearly subscription, AND it doesn't export comments as RSS. This is a huge problem that none of the blogging software really addresses, I feel.

I use LiveJournal much more as a communication/collaboration platform, where the links between people, comment authors, etc. are very important. But there's no standard way to maintain these across different sites, which is why we're all stuck on LiveJournal now. It seems like what we need is a kind of combination of RSS, Atom and FOAF that handles threaded conversations (e.g. a blog post + comments).

Include a NNTP gateway to use all the Usenet clients out there to post and I would be in heaven. :)

Re:LiveJournal

[MsRee]

That's been my plan for months. I have a paid LJ account, so now I just need money to buy decent PHP-enabled hosting so I can install Magpie RSS. LiveJournal also has (for paid users) an option to use a separate style for "embedding" into a site (using a custom view), but I haven't looked into it. To me, the point of embedding is to no longer have "livejournal.com" hanging in the URL.

Re:The Best Webloging system is slashdotted here.

[Scutter]

Shave every day and you'll always look keen.

Holy carp! I used to have that on a 45 RPM when I was a kid! I didn't know anyone else had ever heard of it.

What about Forum software?

[DoomHaven]

Weblog software is nice and all, but what about software for forums/boards? The only company I know is Invision with their "Invision Power Board" software. Is there any similiar or superior software?

Re:What about Forum software?

[Daniel_Staal]

How about Slash? It runs the little site you are on right now... (There are others too. Take a good look through Google.)

Re:What about Forum software?

[DoomHaven]

Hmmm... no, I am thinking more about something that has multiple forums, like on the board sites used like this World of Warcraft site. To me, Slash is blog software, and that not exactly what I want.

Re:What about Forum software?

[yamcha666]

phpBB

I've used it many of times to host forums, here are a couple examples:

Knight Time Media Forum

The Everdead Message Board

Re:What about Forum software?

[mikis]

Check phpBB (open source, free, very popular) or vBulletin (also excellent, but commercial).

Re:What about Forum software?

[Anonymous Coward]

vbportal and 4 other free versions are totally integrated with vbulletin.

Also, side-by-side CMS comparison matrix

[Brent Nordquist]

at The CMS Matrix; you can pick up to 10 you want to compare.

MOD PARENT DOWN-GOATSE

[The_Mystic_For_Real]

The link in the parent post redirects to the infamous goatse.cx image. Fortunately I managed to read the end of the url before clicking.

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN-GOATSE

[Red Alastor]

In fact, the link is : http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-fr eedom.html?op=redirect&url=http://goat.cx/ It can't link to goatse.cx since it ends by http://goat.cx/ (no se). Mozilla go directly to the FSF page and don't care for the extra bit. The link is stupid but not harmful but I support the motion to mod down.

WordPress.org

[saxmatt]

Sorry about the WordPress.org site guys, I'm doing my best to bring it up ASAP.

Re:WordPress.org

[saxmatt]

I forgot the helpful link:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cafelog/

That's our project on SF, you can download everything from there.

I didn't like any of them...

[DrJonesAC2]

.. so I wrote my own ;)

Re:I didn't like any of them...

[Tomble]

Heh, I did much the same thing, except my approach was much more, eh... ad-hoc, and for some reason it seemed a good idea at first to use m4 to write most of it.

Unfortunately, by the time it all started to go horribly wrong (because I found how slow m4 got when pressed to do anything complex), I found it a bit daunting to convert all that stuff to Perl. So it's been kind of languishing for the past month or so, unfortunately, as has my website. AFAIK, I'm the only one who ever used it (I've not put it on Freshmeat yet, too primitive).

(before anybody asks, the system was to create pages for a statically served website, no PHP etc; It runs on my desktop and then uploads the content to the server. Actually, strictly speaking, it's not really made for blogging, it's just a general CMS- but you could use it as a simple blog of sorts)

Good timing

[image]

Just this weekend I decided to move my own personal site over to a CMS/Blog system to make updating it even easier. I spent a while doing similar research, and ultimately ended up chosing Bloxsom as the right tool for my needs. It took me only 15 minutes to set everything up, and only a few more hours to write my first plug-in. Blosxom probably isn't the right tool for most applications, but for a personal site it met my needs precisely. In fact, I even migrated another site off of Moveable Type that same weekend.

Again, I documented the (rather brief) decision making process here.

Re:Good timing

[dargaud]

I concur. After reading your message, I decided to give Blosxom a shot. 15 minutes later I had a bunch of entries running in my first blog ever.

Re:Good timing

[asdren]

my first blogging attempt was with MT.
recently I've been using WP (which is very, very cool). I'm gonna give Bloxsom a whirl now for the heck of it.

Diveintomark.org

[authenticgeek]

The last link (to diveintomark.org) is now hosed but he posted another article after his 'Freedom-0' article which adds to the original article. He states in the first that all non-free software eventually leads nowhere but then explains his opinion further (with the admission that he uses plenty of non-free software as well) in his newer article. Also, I agree with the comment that it's a fairly limited comparison and really nothing you should base a professional decision off of. You have to experience the community and the CMS before you commit to it, in my opinion.

Re:Diveintomark.org

[Isofarro]

The last link (to diveintomark.org) is now hosed but he posted another article after his 'Freedom-0' article which adds to the original article.

Google cache of Freedom-0, and his follow-up Aftermath.

Mark Pilgrim put his money where his mouth is and donated $535 to Wordpress - an open source blogging tool. The amount was the same as the fee Movable Type were charging for their scripts according to their usage scales.

Any CMS's oriented towards file exchange?

[swb]

Some of the ones I've looked into (like phpNuke and Geeklog) have download sections, but none are typically oriented towards this.

Are there any like this? I'm thinking basic (.htpasswd) type authentication and a simple file layout.

Re:Any CMS's oriented towards file exchange?

[Twyst]

I agree.

I ended up writing my own file download system, since well-organized downloads are the bulk of my site. It supports ratings, categories with subcategorys (ad infinitum), local and remote download links, download tracking, multiple screenshots, related downloads by author, searching, and the files are not directly accessible via the web - only through the download scripts (which makes leech protection possible)

I've been toying with the idea of cleaning up the code (it's in PHP, and is a bastardized hybrid of classes and inline code) and releasing it. Right now, it's not very portable.

To avoid my personal machine melting down.. I'm not going to link the site here.. but if you want to check it out, drop me a line.

Why just blog?

[gmuslera]

There are more kind of things one could want to publish, even from the personal point of view, that don't fit very well in the blog approach. You have wiki pages, discussion forums, tabular information, file or image galleries, and a lot more ways to store and manage "content" in very different ways.

Maybe is not yet perfect, but i like TikiWiki because it have all in one single package (enabling some sort of integration between features, unified security, etc).

Re:Why just blog?

[ichimunki]

Yep. Wiki is my preference, although I use a somewhat modified UseMod Wiki (I have tried TWiki in the past and found it a bit too much-- plus, IIRC, it has kinda goofy markup compared to what you see most places).

The biggest thing I found lacking in UseMod was the ability to have a little "front page" blurb about recent changes, so I hacked one up. This allows the front page to contain links to my journal entries and keep visitors up to speed on the important stuff that's new since last visit. I have some other plans for additional hacks... and one that just occurred to me that would be really handy is a way to build photo galleries just using the Wiki.

Re:Why just blog?

[bblfish]

I agree. SnipSnap also offers the Wiki/Blog combination in a 1 minute install. Its available under the GPL, is constantly being worked on, and has a huge number of features.

CMS Specifically for Writers?

[Landaras]

Is anyone aware of CMS's designed specifically for writers (or adaptable to them)? Or perhaps what I envision a Content Management System doing is different from what others are doing.

Specifically what I am in the process of coding (poorly) is a system that will allow me to manage and elegantly present information about the various writing I've done. This information would be metadata such as Date Written, Themes, Similar Pieces, Inspiration, etc...

What I have now on my personal site is pretty rudimentary. (example)

I just have the texts themselves as individual HTML files in a separate directory, while the metadata is in a MySQL database that is queried through PHP.

Thoughts, links, direction, or experiences to share?

- Neil Wehneman

Re:CMS Specifically for Writers?

[Anonymous Coward]

check out vbportal.com...it will let you copy the html into one text area and create a article page for you. On top of that, because it's an addon to vbulletin, you can do subscriptions if you desired as subscriptions, and payment options are built right into vbulletin.

blosxom

[alexc]

i have always found blosxom just the easist to setup. I love the fact that i don't need run a database. plus i could use vi to blog :)

The best blogging "system?" Please.

[LesPaul75]

It's amazing that people will actually pay for software that does nothing more than blog. Anyone ever heard of Notepad (or vi)? It has pretty much all the features of every popular blogging tool out there, and is probably much easier to use.

I'm not being sarcastic... What's a blog? A bunch of text with fonts and an IMG tag here or there. If you can't figure out the insanely complex HTML required for that, then your blog probably isn't very interesting, anyway.

And, for the super, uber-elite coders, you could write about three lines of CGI to handle all that intense formatting for you. Or just download one of the bazillion free scripts to do it. If you pay for blogging software, you are a sucker. But I'll sell you my blogging "system" if the price is right.

Install challenge?

[H310iSe]

I just finished my first WordPress install (win2ksrv) and it was a breeze. Only two problems I've had, the CSS seems to get lost occasionally (the page displays w/o any formatting, but I'm sure it'l be easy to solve, I screwed around w/ the file system and probably broke something) and the default display of the comments is a little hard to read (but I've not yet started playing around with other display templates).

I wish the comparison gave a ranking of setup complexity, or a general 'ease of maintenance' score ... from my experience I'd give WordPress and 8 or 9 out of 10 in both categories.

Wordpress looks good, except the database...

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like Wordpress is the way to go except that it is quite tied to MySQL. I know that MySQL is popular, but for those of us who have already built our sites on Postgres, it is a bit of a pain to switch. Fortunately there are 10 others to choose from in that article; hopefully some of them will suport PG.

----------
WAP porn

Re:Wordpress looks good, except the database...

[h3]

Fortunately there are 10 others to choose from in that article; hopefully some of them will suport PG.

Like you, I'm not interested in running anything that requires MySQL. The article lists 2 that can use Postgres - MoveableType and Serendipity. I just switched from MT to Serendipity. Take the Postgres support with a grain of salt- while the basic functionality works there are a lot of queries embedded throughout that are not Postgres compatible.

For example, make sure to set a prefix for the table names during install. I set mine to no prefix and got burned badly because one of the table names turns out to be "references" sans prefix and this is a reserved word in Postgres (does MySQL not have foreign key references yet?). None of the queries in the code properly quoted this, the table never got created during install, and the whole thing went down in flames.

Oh, and don't even think about 3rd party plugins.

So yes, the s9y people are working on Postgres support and I appreciate that they are even making an effort, but it's clear that s9y is a MySQL-based product first, with bugfixes for Pg compatibility. Drupal is the same way. That's fine - I appreciate their efforts. But if you want something that runs robustly on Pg, you might want to look elsewhere.

Actually, I don't think such a thing exists :p.

-h3 (yes, I'll try to submit patches)

Re:Wordpress looks good, except the database...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the tip on that. I had narrowed it down to Serendipity and Pivot, and now it's clear that I'm going with Pivot, because it doesn't use a database at all. There's just no way I'm installing something with MySQL because I already use PG for everything and I'm not installing another database. Now I just need to find some good templates for Pivot.

Why Licensing is Needed Mirror

[karmatic]

The "Why Licensing is Needed" mirror is genuinely slow - Here's a mirror
Note: The first couple to use it will be slow, but it will speed up really fast afterwards.

The best one I had

[jb.hl.com]

...I wrote myself.

Two PHP scripts, plus an additional, .htpasswd protected one to post stuff. It worked a charm, had multiple categories, allowed comment posting...it took me about two hours to do, and even better it allowed me to have the site exactly the way I wanted it, and not the way it would fit around the CMS. It's also a great way to learn how to code. It was fast and reliable. However, I'm just using raw HTML now: only one author, and I'm sitting at the server, so why not? And if it's good enough for Maddox it's good enough for me :)

slashdot's journal

[cheese_wallet]

I don't use it myself, but it seems that slashot's journal is essentially a free blog.

Re:slashdot's journal

[cheese_wallet]

Actually I thought I would give the journal a try. have a look if you are bored.

what, no mention about Drupal?

[halfelven]

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.

Re:what, no mention about Drupal?

[kbahey]

Drupal is great of course, but it is not only a weblog.

It is a full fledged CMS application. It is also an extensible framework for web applications as well (someone wrote an e-commerce package for it).

Labelling it as a weblog system is too restrictive, though it handles that part pretty well too.

Re:what, no mention about Drupal?

[halfelven]

Yeah, sorry, i put the wrong emphasis.
It's just me that i'm using it strictly as a blogger: i disabled all non-blog-relevant modules in the admin interface and that was it.

But yes, it's a capable CMS framework.

Movable Type has a fair license...

[telbij]

All these Movable Type bloggers whining about the new licensing scheme is getting a little old. Sure I agree that the new licensing move is stupid (considering the quality of the product), but they have every right to go and shoot themselves in the foot if they want.

As far as the individual blogger is concerned, the lesson is this: use a tool that will allow you to migrate your data. Tools will continue to advance, and you can always redesign, but your archives the only irreplaceable part of the whole equation. In the case of Movable Type, you are already ahead of the game because every other blogging tool in existence imports MT data.

Why you migrate is a non-issue. You could just as easily be forced to abandon a GPLed package because it is no longer being upgraded and you need the latest features. Even if you write your own CMS, you still run the risk of not having time to add the features you need! Paying a license fee is just one of many considerations you need to make when picking a CMS.

Re:Movable Type has a fair license...

[Spoing]

1. You could just as easily be forced to abandon a GPLed package because it is no longer being upgraded and you need the latest features.

GPL or not...with the source, it's more likely that you or someone else who wants to migrate can be able to move on without loosing data. Much of the work is already done for you...or the format might be understandable enough to parse it out yourself...and allow you to move on to the tool of your choice.

What possible motivation would a propriatory application provider have to help you migrate?

That's one of the reasons why I chose Bugzilla for a defect tracking system...a migration path to Scarab and other tools was already available!

This is the reason why Microsoft Office is such a PITA and why they have such a dominate hold on Microsoft and potential Microsoft Office customers.

Re:Movable Type has a fair license...

[OmegaGeek]

As far as the individual blogger is concerned, the lesson is this: use a tool that will allow you to migrate your data.

I'm glad you raise that as a point. Mark Pilgrim has talked about freedom 0 being the freedom to run the program for any purpose (OK - technically this comes from the Free Software Foundation, but Mark is the one being quoted on this). But there is an often overlooked right in all the discussion about Free vs. Proprietary software, and that is the right to access my data. I like MT precisely because I can access my data quite easily through their export mechanism (which I think may be MT's greatest feature). Anything that produces output which can be viewed in a text editor is a useful tool because I can find a way to translate my data so it can be used by another program.

I support Free Software, but I am not dogmatically tied to it at the expense of giving up my right to access my data. And before it gets mentioned in reply to this, I don't think that Free Software (having access to source code specifically) guarantees everyone's right to access their data, since not everyone is going to be able to understand the source code or be able to use the talent of someone who does.

In addition to Free Software, we need data standards to make it useful for all possible users. Maybe we need someone proficient in XML to create a blogML? Oh wait - Dave Winer did that with RSS, but he was perceived (fairly or unfairly? - who can tell anymore, but its no longer relevant) as being too rigid in his guardianship of the standard.

Re:Movable Type has a fair license...

[dave1212]

use a tool that will allow you to migrate your data

I use iBlog myself, but Bloxsom lets you just save as text files and put them in folders for organization. it's easily the most reassuring system as far as being able to move your data when you want. I used it for a bit, works as advertised.

Re:The best blogging "system?" Please.

[Tumbleweed]

Uhm, no, you lose. You clearly don't know what blog software does. It is NOT the same as an HTML editor, which is what you seem to think.

3 lines of CGI isn't going to handle multiple weblogs, multiple authors with accounts & permissions, user accounts, pinging & trackbacks, RSS/Atom feeds, etc.

about to switch

[trippin_efnet]

i currently use movable type, and while i like it, and think its fairly easy to use.. i have to agree with earlier posters here, its kind of silly to use any kind of cms that is not open source.

ive been looking around for a while now and it seems that wordpress is the most complete package with a good community behind it. the community behind it is important because if you ever run into any kinds of problems, the more people supporting it the better. i guess it is just as important as it is to have a good community behind any kind of open source software.

if i am incorrect and there are bigger communities behind any of the other complete gpl'd packages, please let me know, maybe i missed something.

GPL misconception

[Pretzalzz]

Mark Pilgrim:

Regardless, GPL software has the restrictions that it has, but it can never become more restrictive. An upgrade can't take away freedoms that I enjoyed with an older version.

This is simply not true. Any license can be changed with the consent of all the copyright holders. With GPL software like the kernel, this is simply infeasible due to the large number of contributors. But if all of the copyright is controlled by a single company, this is trivial. The community can always fork from the last GPL release, but the community could also continue to use Movable Type pre3.0 plus [increasingly complex] patches. If they can't than they never had any freedom in the first place, regardless an upgrade didn't take away freedoms[except as could also happen if the software were GPL].

Re:GPL misconception

[exhilaration]

What the guy above is trying to say is that you can't RETROACTIVELY change the license to GPL'ed software. If version 1.0 was GPL, you can make version 2.0 non-GPL. But anybody can take version 1.0 and continue working on it, forking it into a new product, and there's nothing you can do about it. That's because the license to 1.0 can never be changed - that "permanence" is in the GPL.

Re:GPL misconception

[f3e2]

This is covered later in the article:

WordPress is Free Software. Its rules will never change. In the event that the WordPress community disbands and development stops, a new community can form around the orphaned code. It's happened once already. In the extremely unlikely event that every single contributor (including every contributor to the original b2) agrees to relicense the code under a more restrictive license, I can still fork the current GPL-licensed code and start a new community around it. There is always a path forward. There are no dead ends.

Re:GPL misconception

[yivi]

You could, as the owner of the CR, change your mind and release 1.0 under a different license.

But that license would only apply to those acquiring from you after the change of license.

People who got 1.0GPL would be able to to as they saw fit (including redistributing 1.0GPL), since they never accepted the new license.

Or at least that's how I managed to understand it.

Re:GPL misconception

[Buran]

Gracenote didn't think so. The scary part? Roxio caved -- never mind the fact that freedb was built from a version of cddb that had been released under the GPL. Apparently, if you're big enough, you can whine and pout long enough and loud enough that even if someone uses a GPLed version of your software -- released before you decided to change your license -- you can get your way.

Isn't the GPL meant to avoid this crap? Sure enough, my copy of Toast 5 doesn't have a way to change back to freedb -- and I've filed numerous requests to restore the feature, to no avail. I don't know if Toast 6 finally put the feature back or not, as Toast 5 is perfectly sufficient for what I need out of a CD burning app. Same with Apple's iTunes -- it still doesn't have a way to change databases. (I'm not sure if my modified /etc/hosts file is actually redirecting it to one of the freedb servers, like I intended.)

Roxio needs to put freedb back, and when Gracenote starts whining again, tell 'em where they can shove it.

Re:GPL misconception

[james.clark]

The advantage with projects like b2evolution, WordPress and probably a few more (but I haven't checked them out enough) is that there are many different contributors. This makes it very unlikely that all of them would ever agree to release a version x.0 under a new license. Thus it is vitually guaranteed that these projects will stay FREE as in GPL forever! :)

Why WordPress Is Poised To Take Over

[WombatControl]

I've had a site running on MT for the past two years, with nearly a year's worth of Blogger entries before that. About 4,000 individual entries and over 6,000 comments dating back over three years. One would think that migrating a site of that size would be a royal pain in the ass.

WordPress imported the whole thing in a matter of minutes. It's easier to upgrade from MT2.6 to WordPress than it is from MT 2.6 to MT 3.0.

WordPress is fortunate to have hit its stride just as the MT licensing brewhaha was hitting. WP 1.2 has all the features of MT, runs faster, and is completely open source and GPL licensed. It's a bit of a paradigm shift from MT - you have to get used to a dynamically-run system rather than static templates, but once you grasp the power it brings it offers a lot of new potential for blog development. Plus, there are a lot of talented hackers who have been turned off by MT licensing and will be developing WP plugins instead. WP even has features that MT doesn't - for instance automated link management. That alone makes it worth the upgrade.

Plus, future versions will support multiple blogs under one interface, some more commenting controls, and other features. I'd expect as WordPress captures marketshare the development of new core features and plugins will increase as well.

That's a big selling point - even if the WP developers wanted to pull the rug out under free users like Six Apart did, they couldn't. WordPress is GPL software, meaning freedom is but a fork away. Mark Pilgrim's piece does an excellent job of detailing why that freedom is so important. It's another reminder of why open source software is better than proprietary software in terms of flexibility and licensing.

Re:Why WordPress Is Poised To Take Over

[abischof]

WP even has features that MT doesn't - for instance automated link management. That alone makes it worth the upgrade.

What do you mean by automated link management, btw? (I even tried searching Google, but only got vague references to WP & blogrolls and such.)

Re:Why WordPress Is Poised To Take Over

[jacoplane]

It can be found here:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedo m-0

Re:Why WordPress Is Poised To Take Over

[amorangi]

Plus, future versions will support multiple blogs under one interface, some more commenting controls, and other features.

Personally I find the other B2 branch - B2evolution better, since it allows multiple blogs right now! It also has great comment spam filters and coment control.
I imported all my entries from MT just fine with a beta importer in seconds.
You are right - it is easier to install and migrate to WP or B2vo than upgrade versions of MT!.
I wish I'd been prompted to switch earlier!

Re:Why WordPress Is Poised To Take Over

[jacoplane]

Try out wordpress

Re:Why WordPress Is Poised To Take Over

[MissTuxie]

I hear you. I had a minor feud (never sign up with hostgiga or hostbreeze) with my hosting provider and lost my MT installation. It was chaos when I first installed it, so I wasn't in the mood to go through it all again. I kept a import file at hand at all times (yeah, right, it was pure nightmare trying to get my blog entries back) so I just instaled WP and in a matter of minutes had it all back again. Loved it. Also, not having to rebuild all the time is all the shizzle.

Re:Why WordPress Is Poised To Take Over

[asdren]

another vote for switching from MT to WordPress.
I like the sub-categories and the admin interface is a whole lot cleaner than MT.

Re:Why WordPress Is Poised To Take Over

[ch33kyMonkee]

Personally, I think anyone that plays around with WordPress will eventually see how much better it is than MovableType and just switch... I did a short while ago and can't even think of ever going back.

Re:Why WordPress Is Poised To Take Over

[Jordy]

I'm sticking with MT myself.

I don't really want to run MySQL. I don't really want to maintain it. It is just not something I want to deal with. MT lets me use a little local database.

I really really don't want dynamic pages. I just don't need it. I have had zdnet link to my blog which caused a trillion avantgo clients to hit it. I just don't need queries to MySQL and PHP being run all the time. Actually PHP by itself wouldn't be so bad if it cached everything in a local file the first time the page required it as long as it supported if-modified-since and ranges correctly.

I actually kind of like the idea of TypeKey. Of course nothing prevents you from implementing TypeKey support in WordPress.

I simply don't care about silly licensing issues. I mean, for a single non-commercial blog, nothing has changed.

I have an upgrade path. Sooner or later WordPress will probably integrate a local databse and real caching. When that happens if it is better than MT, I'll migrate. I just don't see the point in migrating right now.

Re:Why WordPress Is Poised To Take Over

[Twylite]

Mark Pilgrim's piece does an excellent job of explaining why he is a whinging little shit that needs to get a life.

*whine* entrepreneurial company creates software "light years ahead of its competition" and gives us shitloads of mad permissions to do shit with it that it has no obligation to do, but it didn't give it away for free *whine*

*whine* everything open source sucked so I was forced to use their crap *whine*

*whine* I can still use their crap for free but if I want their new improved "even more crap" I have to pay for it *whine*

*whine* WordPress rocks, even when its not being developed, MT sucks. WordPress is mad free. Despite this I'm going to bitch about the price of MT, clearly showing that I don't really want to use WordPress because if I really thought it was better for me I would just change and not have to whine about how much MT would cost me to upgrade *whine*

*whine* In the long run freesoft rocks, because within just a few years you will be able to choose any one of 70 crap imitations of a crap product none of which will do most of what you want, but you'll love it anyway because its not Microsoft and you're happy as long as noone is allowed to make something cool without giving you his fucking code. *whine*

*whine* And finally, No, your mother.

Re:Why WordPress Is Poised To Take Over

[james.clark]

At the beginning there was a "classy blogtool" called b2.

When Michel V., the original author of b2, stopped development of his tool, two forks emerged simultaneously: b2evolution and WordPress.

This was in early 2003. For some reason, Michel V. later chose to endorse the WordPress fork as an "official" successor to his work.

Anyway, both forks have developped at approximately the same pace but with slighlty different orientations. b2evolution is merely moving towards a larger scale multilingual multiuser multiblog system, maybe even a full featured CMS, while WordPress is merely concentrating on adding sweetness to basic blogging, like image thumbnail generation, etc.

Having looked at the sourcecode, WordPress is closer to the original b2, while b2evolution has been significantly rewritten in a more object oriented way (as far as PHP 4 can be considered OO).

Another one

[CapnRob]

This one's commercial, but it's easier to cope with than the other ones I've got experience with - InkNoise.com 's offering is more of a service than a package you can install, but it has pretty good configuration tools, and it's easy enough for the Aunt Tilly crowd to use.

Need a row for packages available

[daves]

Which ones have rpm and deb files generally available?

Re:Need a row for packages available

[saxmatt]

emerge wordpress
apt-get wordpress

Re:Need a row for packages available

[tverbeek]

While availability in packaged format is a legitimate line item for a comparison chart, I would encourage people not to put much emphasis on it. MT (for example) is mostly just a bundle of Perl scripts, which can be installed easily enough from a tarball. As a sysadmin I'm at the comfort level that usually begs for .rpm or .pkg instead of .tgz, but I found MT a piece of cake to install. The only difficult part for me was remembering how to create an empty database with the right permissions in MySQL (which no package manager would have been able to help with).

Re:The best blogging "system?" Please.

[Gumber]

With a decent blogging tool I can post a link to a page with a text excerpt and some brief commentary with minimal effort:

1. Select text
2. Click blogging bookmarklet.
3. Add any comments
4. Click the post button

I can't do that with notepad. Of course, I can do it with free software.

Other things that take more work with notepad.
1. Cycling stuff off my front page.
2. Creating archive pages.
3. Creating navigation by topic
4. Keeping a consistent template for all my blog pages
5. Syndicating blog content in RSS and/or other formats.

Scoop? Slashcode?

[MAXOMENOS]

I'm a little surprised that Scoop and Slashcode aren't being considered for blogging software. They're a little complex maybe, but they've been used for blogging pretty successfully. For example: DailyKos is a pretty successful 'blog, and it does very well on Scoop (which runs Kuro5hin). Beastbay used to run Slashcode.

Re:Scoop? Slashcode?

[jalefkowit]

They're not considered because for personal blogs they are probably more trouble than they're worth. I manage The Oceana Network, a group blog on global efforts to defend the oceans, for my employer, Oceana. (Disclaimer: the opinions expressed here are mine alone and not those of Oceana, yadda yadda.) The Network is based on Scoop.

For a blog like ours, that handles posts from a large group of authors and that needs to be able to support very long discussions, Scoop is fantastic. Give it an inexpensive Linux/BSD box all to itself and it is a very, very nice and flexible online community platform.

However, if you fit the profile of the typical single-author blog author, installing Scoop probably isn't for you. It's a tricky process, requiring "now edit your httpd.conf"-type steps that are just not realistic to expect from someone on a virtual hosting setup. (Not to say that it can't be done -- just that it's not realistic to expect many people to do it.)

And Scoop's primary benefit -- its very nice moderated comment system -- is wasted on a personal blog, where no post will ever get more than a few comments. (I know that ours doesn't have that many yet either, but we've only been up and running for a couple of weeks... give us time :-) )

For those users, MT, WordPress, etc. are much better solutions -- easier installs, and just enough features to be useful without overcomplicating things.

If your blogging ambitions are grander than a simple personal site, though, Scoop is great -- definitely check it out if you haven't already.

Re:Scoop? Slashcode?

[ucblockhead]

Scoop is a pain in the ass to set up compared to other blogging software. It's also a bit of overkill for blogging.

Re:Scoop? Slashcode?

[Zugok]

Compared to PHP software sure it takes a bit more effort, but not a lot. Linux users can use ther install.pl script anyway. I have functional scoop install running sucessfully on a Windows box. That did takle a bit more time, but it's working without a hitch.

Re:Scoop? Slashcode?

[ucblockhead]

Unfortunately, the "install.pl" script does not always work.

Drupal

[Anonymous Coward]

After a long months of searching and attempting to find the right CMS software I finally found Drupal, and find it to be the best by far of all those I looked at.

The CMSes that I looked at are Slash, PHPSlash, Mambo (which BTW, is very good but not for community weblogs like slashdot), PHPNuke, and PostNuke.

I have found Drupal to be technically superior to all of them. But what makes it even more attractive to me is the fact that the community developing it is very open, active, and polite. There is a lot of communication from Dries (the guy who started the project) as well as the rest of the developers. New versions come out frequently.

Drupal is so much better than PostNuke, which is what I had been using to run my site for months. The postnuke community has no central disscussion board it seems, as well as no direction. It almost seemed dead when I abondoned it.

Re:Drupal

[dealsites]

I evaluated the same, but settled on Postnuke. The communinity there is also very nice and helpful. One of my defining moments as a Postnuke user is that I got slashdotted a few months back. I was really surprised how well Postnuke held up to the load. I'll probably never get that much traffic that quick, but it's nice to know. One thing I read about a lot of popular CMSs is that there can be way to many mysql database queries each time a page loads. Make sure you get a CMS that's designed to be fast from the ground up. Once a lot of work goes into a CMS, it's sometimes hard to go back and re-write the core.

--
New deal processing engine online: http://www.dealsites.net/livedeals.html

Re:Drupal

[halfelven]

Also:
- it's customizable and extensible in a big way
- the community around it is very active
- seems to be designed by people who know how to write software (which sadly is not true when you look at the PHPNuke family)
- very feature-rich
It just rocks. I took some time trying out various solutions, and once i've found Drupal there was no looking back.
I'm still very surprised the article mentioned in the newspiece ignores Drupal.

Re:The best blogging "system?" Please.

[WombatControl]

Are you nuts?

You try manually managing 4,000 entries without going completely bonkers - including permalinks, comments, and extended entries. The whole point of blog software is that you have a system that manages permalinks, organizes information, allows for open exchange, etc. Those are all things that require some kind of infrastructure. Blogging software is really just a specialized form of CMS, and anyone who argues that sites consisting of thousands of pages doesn't need some form of content management and control is quite frankly a complete and utter lunatic.

Or to take your logic, who needs a computer? What is a computer? A device that just does mathematical calculations. If you can't figure out insanely complex matrix operations and vector math, then your're probably not very smart anyway. All those super-elite people can use a slide rule to handle all the intense computation for them. If you pay for computers, you're a sucker...

Pivot

[verloren]

Switched from Blogger to Pivot last week, and so far it's working well. The key attractions for me were greater control and the minimal server requirements (PHP is about it). It works great, there are some really nice touches in there, and it's being actively developed.

Cheers, Paul

Slash

[pipingguy]

Is Slash CMS or blogging software?

Have you tried?

[Hal The Computer]

A nice google search should find you what you want.
Try:

"d00d, l337 WaR3z" + download

ah yes, learn from the masters at exchanging large files

Re:Have you tried?

[swb]

No, I'm actually thinking more of in a business setting. So many email systems limit the size and content that can be transferred that way. FTP works well enough otherwise, but lacks a user interface and is a kind of ugly protocol to deal with from a firewall/security standpoint.

Thusfar we've gotten by kind of merging FTP and Apache with directory listings enabled, with custom host names for each "server". It's stone-axe simple to set up, but lacks reasonable authentication and that "branding" experience the suits are looking for, and FTP for uploads bites.

IMHO the best solution would have HTTP upload/download with a simple 2-level file layout, basic authentication (read only, read/write, read/write/erase), new file notification, and that's about it.

dotProject looks interesting, but so many of these systems drown you in features that you'll never use.

Re:Have you tried?

[TwinkieStix]

Thusfar we've gotten by kind of merging FTP and Apache with directory listings enabled, with custom host names for each "server". It's stone-axe simple to set up, but lacks reasonable authentication and that "branding" experience the suits are looking for, and FTP for uploads bites.

I think you are looking for ssh server and SFTP. It uses one TCP port (22) and goes right through NAT walls. Filezilla is a good windows "interface" for sftp. If your running Linux or OSX, it's already installed. Just set u[p permissions and symbolic links and you are good to go.

Re:Have you tried?

[swb]

Way too complicated. The overwhelming majority of people we deal with can barely make FTP work, and many of them aren't supportable from an alternative software perspective, since they're at client sites. We're talking PHB/marketing types, not anyone with an ounce of ability.

Perfect Timing

[Salamander]

Wouldn't you know it? I just spent much of the weekend converting my site from my own homegrown weblog codebase to pMachine. Here's the new version (with an entry about the change), and the old version for comparison. According to the table, b2evolution and WordPress would be equally good fits, perhaps even slightly better because they support assigning an entry to multiple categories like my old code but unlike pMachine Free, but when I tried them all out at opensourceCMS that really wasn't the case. I strongly recommend that you check out candidates there, because a lot of the small things make a difference. Here are some examples:

• What kinds of markup is allowed in posts? In comments? Is it plain HTML, or a stripped-down square-bracketed subset like bbCode, or both, or neither? Which are you comfortable with? How about your users who leave comments? If it's real HTML, how are various cross-site scripting and other exploits prevented?
• Are commenters allowed to register so they can have persistent profiles? Are they forced to register? Either/or?
• Does the post entry format allow things like saving drafts, posting to the future, setting expiration dates?
• Does the system have things like time offsets (between where you are and where your site is hosted)? Are the paths that it uses configurable, so you can make it work with different directory structures? How "tunable" are things in general? This can be a huge headache if you get halfway into your transition and you find something that just won't work properly in your environment without hacking the code.
• Do you really like the way the templating system works? You really won't know until you try some customization, so fiddle a bit with the layout. Move stuff around, add links to other parts of your site, etc.
• If you're converting from another system, are there automatic conversion tools? How well do they really work? Again, you have to try to see, and not just on opensourcecms either. If there are no converters, how hard would it be to write one? Does the database schema (and/or file layout) make sense to you? Is it similar conceptually to what you have now? Does it require complex relationships between tables/fields that would be hard to maintain as you suck in your old content? Is there any information in your old content that there's no place for?

These sorts of things, none of which are covered in a mere checklist, really matter when you actually take the plunge. Trying stuff out on opensourcecms is a great first step, but then you should actually download the real thing and really try to run a test version of your own site on it for at least an hour or so, to see if you can truly tweak it to your liking. Only then will you be able to make a decision that will really satisfy you.

Re:Perfect Timing

[darrylo]

Also note that a new version of WordPress was just released over the weekend. This version is much nicer than the old version, which is probably what was previewable on opensourcecms.

Check it out.

Commect sections

[Mc_Anthony]

One weak aspect I find in the blogs I like to visit is they almost all have poor, clunky comment sections. Take littlegreenfoorballs.com for example.

I'm my opinion, the slashdot comment area is very clunky and would love it they ditch their code for a modern PHP/SQL forum...

PHP-Nuke?

[killdashnine]

This is a nice comparison for would-be bloggers, but I'm honestly suprised that PHP-Nuke wasn't mentioned. For a relatively easy to setup CMS, PHP-Nuke has come a long way ...

Some would say, though, that "blogging is dead" or at least experiencing the "long slow slide of weblogs into irrelevance". My hope for anyone wanting to set up their own blog is that they find something useful to write about or turn instead to good 'ol pen and paper whilst they ponder the stealing their neighbor's cat (as get read often on Unscrewed at TechTV).

Re:PHP-Nuke?

[wolverine1999]

The problem of phpnuke is it's got security vulnerabilities (or it had at some time), plus the author kept others from submitting patches to it in a very un-open source fashion.

Many migrated from phpnuke to other CMS such as Xoops.

Drupal

[kbahey]

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.

Keep it simple and stupid

[chrysalis]

The most popular weblog site in french is Skyblog .

It has almost no feature listed in this article. People can just write text, and add an optional picture to every text. The comment system is also extremely basic, with even no threading support.

So why is it so popular, moreover there are plenty of featureful competitors?

Probably because it's minimal, so it's trivial to understand. Weblogs are for people who don't want to learn anything, just publish.

And even Blogger is way too complicated for the average user IMHO.

Also, with a weblog, you just write the text and some script will automagically create the code. So why not make the weblogs produce correct, accessible documents ?

The usual complain of web site designers when you talk them about accessibility is "oh, well... too complicated to implement, I prefer Dreamweaver-made HTML".

With a weblog engine, once templates are properly designed, making the documents accessibles to blind users could be trivial. This is, IMHO, the main point of weblogs, CMS, etc.

But out of every weblog software compared in this document, I can see only once that produces accessible, XHTML-conformant pages : bBlog.

Why? Useless features are fun, but it would be nice to also focus on what a weblog could really bring over traditional sites.

You have the misconception..

[iamsure]

It is true - you cannot take away that freedom.

As soon as I download a GPL'd release, I can fork from that day on, regardless of any changes you choose to make.

MT pre-3 didn't allow you the same rights the GPL does, so no, its not the same either. :)

Re:Write your own

[smittyoneeach]

I think there is a shred of merit in what parent says.
The DIY approach is always worth considering from a self-teaching standpoint.
Once you've understood all of the problems that the rest of the community has solved, though, pitch your idea and get behind something popular.
The only people benefitting from the Open Source fragmentation are the proprietary vendors. While a small number of choices may make sense, keep in mind the ancient architect who noted that houses divided against themselves don't stand...

stay away from PHPnuke

[SethJohnson]

Not that it's expressly a weblog system... it's frequently used as such, though.

I just wanted to drop in a slam on phpNuke because of all the security problems I've had with it. The modules created by third-parties frequently haven't had rigorous security testing and are prone to exploits. If you want to increase your chances of your server being hacked, publish using phpNuke and a few modules. The brazillian script kiddies rabidly chase servers running phpNuke everytime a new exploit is found.

Re:stay away from PHPnuke

[Anonymous Coward]

Some thoughts are wrong here...

PHP-Nuke is a CMS (or Portal System) that has its security issues as all the existent software, but at this point PHP-Nuke is the most secure solution. Due to its popularity, hacker liked to play with it, but after few years of development the system is now the best solution.

People who complaint about PHP-Nuke's security are using old versions, and they doesn't want to update the system... the best version ever made is the latest one (7.3) which includes a bunch of security fixes. In fact the folks behind PHP-Nuke and the security patches are making a wonderful job.

I have PHP-Nuke 7.3 running on my site and I tested all exploits I found for this system, and nicely found that there is NOT a single exploit that worked on this version!!!

LiveJournal break down

[GoNINzo]

Here's a break down of the two options of Livejournal. I'm a permenant member, so there's that bias, but I'm not a developer...

Current Version: 1.1?
Home URL: http://livejournal.org/
Trial URL: http://www.livejournal.com/
License: GPL
Cost(US$): Free
Minimum Server Requestments: Perl 5.6.1, MySQL 3.23.57, Apache 1.3.28, mod_perl 1.28
Localization: Almost all, I think!
Multilingual: Yes
Data Storage: Database
Max Weblogs: Unlimited
Multiple Sites: Yes
Post Ordering: Descending, Ascending
categories: Yes (memories)
Subcatagories: No
Keywords: No
Default Post Fields: 5 (Subject, Mood, Music, Picture, Post body)
Max Post Fields: 5
Post Editor: Textarea, Plugin, custom editors availalbe
Draft Mode: Yes (Private)
Post API Support: LiveJournal API
Post Moderation: Yes (Screening)
Post Pings: unsure
Bookmarklets: unsure
RSS: Yes
Atom Output: unsure
Comments: Threaded
Comment Spam: multiple
Comment RSS: unsure
Template Storage: Unsure
and the rest i'm sure i'm unsure, but I have things to do, sorry. I'm sure someone can complete this list.

Re:LiveJournal break down

[ffrinch]

Note that it's not suitable for single user install, so isn't actually in direct competition with any of those.

Some of these features require a paid membership.

Post API support: also supports the Blogger API
Post pings: IIRC can only ping weblogs.com
Bookmarklets: no official support, but yes, it's been done.
Atom: yes (full text)
Comment RSS: no, but a paid user could hack up a dodgy per-post version
Template storage: Proprietary
Template conditionals: yes (S2)
Edit templates online: yes
Post by email: yes
Linkroll: links list, not sure of max. size

Re:LiveJournal break down

[GoNINzo]

Actually, I'm talking about the source install, not the subscribing based system. And yes, I thought they were looking at replacing 10 journals, not just one. It's not the best system for small groups, but great for large groups due to the scalability... Thanks for more features, I was just getting burned out trying to find stuff I barely knew anything about... heh

Argh. Yet moe of the same FSF falsehoods.

[Jay Maynard]

Mark Pilgrim's article perpetuates the myth that only the FSF's definition of "free" software is adequate to ensure that freely available software remains so. I wish people would quit perpetuating this lie. That's an attribute of any software under a license that fits the Open Source Definition. No matter what, a program released under an OSD-compliant license is now, and will always and forever remain, freely available in source form, and will always and forever remain freely modifiable and redistributable.

Why do people keep spreading this falsehood?

Re:Argh. Yet moe of the same FSF falsehoods.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people keep saying the GPL is freer than any Open Source licence? Maybe because it's true!

Mark Pilgrim's article is about people upgrading from Movable Type 2.4 to 3.0, and whether they had any safety about future versions, not just this one.

An OSI compatible licence does not guarantee that "freely available software remains so" (your words) in this context as a BSD licenced Movable Type 3.0 could be closed up, whereas a GPL licenced Movable Type couldn't be.

(by "couldn't be" I mean as per copyright law - naturally, the same could happen under a GPL licence if the authors choose another less free licence)

Given the context where we're not talking about the 2.4 terms being taken away and it is about the upgrade path, the GPL gives more safety than BSD, which is also fits the Open Source Definition.

Which is why I think you're wrong.

Re:Argh. Yet moe of the same FSF falsehoods.

[Anonymous Coward]

didn't I see you on Jimmy Campbell show? Channel 4?

jspWiki?

[jarich]

Anyone have experience with jsp wiki's weblog feature?

I used jsp wiki and was considering an upgrade to a get 'cheap' blog up but have no idea if it's any good or not.

http://www.jspwiki.org

http://www.jspwiki.org/Wiki.jsp?page=FAQWeblog

I have no affiliation... just wondering.

Re:jspWiki?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, JSPWiki is pretty good. For a full-featured java-based blog, I'd use Roller though.

how about a blog software that doesn't require sql

[whizkid042]

I've been looking for a piece of blogging software that doesn't require a SQL server. I've been using MovableType, storing its data in a BerkleyDB file. However, I'd like to move away from MovableType (for licensing issues, as well as usability issues).

Any suggestions for this case? And please don't say "change hosting providers" because I'm doing this for a University program and it needs to be hosted in University webspace. Hence no SQL server.

Re:how about a blog software that doesn't require

[gludington]

I've been looking for a piece of blogging software that doesn't require a SQL server. I've been using MovableType, storing its data in a BerkleyDB file. However, I'd like to move away from MovableType (for licensing issues, as well as usability issues)

Bloxsom and Blojsom both use the filesystem to store blog entries, and require no database.

Any that just do the following

[Anonymous Coward]

What I've been looking for is something for a personal site that can do a blog/news main page, photo gallery, as well as the ability to have a few static pages. All editable online/admin site. It doesn't have to allow user comments and multiple users and all that stuff. Maybe a forum would be nice but not nessacary. Any ideas? Something simple ... nothing bloated.

Another blogging system overlooked.

[MachineShedFred]

Wow. Here we have a bunch of blogging software being reported about, and there is one being overlooked.

Hmm...

Re:Another blogging system overlooked.

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno about you but personally I think slashcode sucks donkey penis. It's ugly as hell with links all over the place and the comment system for the articles is the worst thing I've ever used. If I didn't like verbally smacking the asshats who spread misinformation around here I wouldn't even visit this site anymore.

snipsnap

[bblfish]

They are missing SnipSnap, an fantastically easy to install java GPLd blog/wiki server. Try it out at snipsnap.org.

It's not as bad as you suggest

[Anonymous Coward]

There's some value-add that is closed source (LiveJournal.com has to make some money) but the majority of stuff is there. I can't really think of anything major that isn't part of the GPL-licenced distribution.

There are a few missing S2 layouts and some of the more obscure community features (LiveJournal Singles, for example) aren't included. All the webloggy-stuff is in there.

It won't run under mod_perl 2.0 right now because they changed some of the interfaces, but that will probably be addressed at some point.

Re:It's not as bad as you suggest

[forevermore]

There is a lot of stuff that runs behind the scenes at livejournal that isn't actually part of the livejournal package (we build their hardware, and have had chats with their developers about some of the cool stuff they're doing). But you're right, all of the basic functionality is there in the OSS version.

Re:It's not as bad as you suggest

[Suppafly]

not to mention the fact that even most of the closed source stuff is viewable through cvs, they just ask that you look at it and learn from it instead of just outright copying it.

Client Side Weblog Editor

[bblfish]

All the listed Weblogs are server side. That is missing out on a very useful category of Weblog editors: client side only editors. This is really useful for those of you who have a web server that does not have enough space to put up php or other server side magic: check out James Gosling's BlogEd. The nice thing about BlogEd is you can write and manage your blog whithout being connected to the web. It produces simple html which is the ftp-ed to the server at minimal cost. There is still a lot of ways it can be improved. But the idea is certainly very original. And it is free: available under a BSD licence.

Interesting

[TheSpoom]

That chart is very interesting, gotta remember it. I'm making blogging software myself (mostly because I'm bored).

Standard DB layout

[renelicious]

I wish all of the (open source, I assume the others wouldn't want to play nicely) CMSes would come up with a standard database schema. Everyone of them has some overlapping fields such as "username" "password", "story id", etc. etc.

I wish they could all agree on a schema for the overlaping ones and then extend it for things that they might need. That way changing wouldn't be nearly as hard. I know this is a little off topic but I've just been wanting to say this ever since I tried to switch CMSes about 6 months ago.

Re:Standard DB layout

[prostoalex]

Realistically the database schema should be left to the designers of the tool, so that any optimizations and short cuts can be incorporated into the later versions of the tool, but there should be a single XML standard, to which the tools should be able to export-import.

Drupal?

[deno]

I'm somewhat surprised to see drupal forgotten in this comparison. FYI, I've evaluated most of the packs mentioned on that site lately, and choose drupal in the end.

Sure, my needs aren't everyone needs, but I got the impression that drupal is quite popular out there...

Another one not mentioned

[X-Nc]

I've been using iBlog for a while and it's not bad. It only works on a Mac OS X system and with a .Mac account so it's very "propriatery" but it's fairly decent as blogs go.

Other Free/Open Java blogging software and sites

[MCRocker]

They are missing SnipSnap, an fantastically easy to install java GPLd blog/wiki server. Try it out at snipsnap.org.

While you're plugging Java based blogging software, don't forget the Roller Weblogger, which runs JRoller and, since the article includes blosxom, people should also be aware of blojsom, which is a Java based clone of blosxom. Naturally, there are others out there too.

P.S. Since the original post didn't provide a direct link, here's one for the home page of SnipSnap.

And for something completely different: BlogEd

[bblfish]

And on the Java side there is also BlogEd James Gosling's Client Side Blog Editor, which just ftps the html to the server. A very useful tool for thin servers.

Re:And for something completely different: BlogEd

[MCRocker]

And on the Java side there is also BlogEd James Gosling's Client Side Blog Editor

This seems like a pattern for Mr. Gosling. He seems to like re-inventing the wheel.

which just ftps the html to the server. A very useful tool for thin servers.

Isn't that what the "free" version of Google's Blogger does already?

Re:And for something completely different: BlogEd

[bblfish]

Yes. This is the perfect slashdot thread to speak about re-inventing the wheel. It looks like there are at least 30 different Weblog Server out there, if not more. And some guy got pissed off because James Gosling wrote his own agregator. Weird.

Isn't that what the "free" version of Google's Blogger does already?

No it is not. That requires a thin client: namely a web browser, and it is connected to a thick server: Google (think about the number of machines they have, then you will understant what I mean by thick). In order to write a blog you have to be connected to their server. You have to write your blog into an html form, which is not very featurefull. You have to be on the internet to post it to their servers.
BlogEd on the other hand is a thick client. You can write and manage your blog without even being connected. You are not going through a third party to manage your blogs. Each has its advantages. There is a lot more than can be done to improve BlogEd, and I don't want to deny that Blogger does have many cool features. I was just pointing out that this is a way to post your blogs that can easily be overlooked.

Textpattern

[amblin]

It's worth mentioning that Textpattern, currently BSD'ish, will be going to a commercial license at some point.
See this form post for details:
http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=505

Re:Textpattern

[amblin]

Seems Dean has clarified its license.
http://textpattern.com/dev/article/10/textpattern- is-open-source

Re:how about a blog software that doesn't require

[Anonymous Coward]

How do they do searches then? (which is all I'm really using this for)

Changing Pages

[Anonymous Coward]

There's always Changing Pages. If you can ever get it to work!

NucleusCMS

[TV-SET]

Yet another CMS/blogging piece of software that noone mentioned is Nucleus CMS. It's a GPLed piece of PHP software that works with MySQL and provides the usual array of functionality. It has a very flexible template system which is skinnable too. It also has a variety of plugins, which can extend the functionality even further. All usual stuff is supported - RSS, comment control, antispam, weahter, and blah blah blah.

A couple of month ago I've migrated from to it from a homemade halfbaked script that I used and I am a happy man. But I don't need much, so you better check it out for yourself. :)

GPL is...

[pmsyyz]

The page says:

GPL
GNU Public License

GPL actually stands for General Public License. Usually the GNU GPL.

Minor mistakes like this are annoying.

Re:The best blogging "system?" Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

By using blogging software, I don't have to give out my FTP password to the 17+ people current posting occasional tidbits on our site's blog -- or train them all how to do HTML and FTP. Instead, they can input their data directly from a site. And no, I don't pay for blogging software either, but that's because open source solutions (WordPress) fit our needs. (We just switched from Movable Type having no inclination or money to pay the $699 they'd charge and are quite happy.)

Re: phpBB Fetch All

[Mitchell Mebane]

phpBB Fetch All isn't a blog system, but it would be quite handy for writing yours. It is a library of functions for getting data out of phpBB without having to know the phpBB databse structure or SQL.

unto.net

[Anonymous Coward]

Might suggest adding some filtering on the search engine of unto.net site?

Moderators on crack again...

[Anonymous Coward]

How exactly is the parent a troll?

Radio Userland and Manila

[JohnsonWax]

What about Radio Userland and Manila?

Manila can host thousands of sites and Radio is a really clever application that requires little more than FTP or WebDAV to host - so you can use your Mac.com account or somesuch. Mac/Windows only, though, but it can so some really amazing things that you'd be hard pressed to do with PHP/MySQL.

What about Coranto?

[Quattro Vezina]

I use Coranto for my blog, plus the iSay addon as a commenting system and it works fine for me. Of course, it has relatively low traffic (and I'd like to keep it that way...I'm not putting my DynDNS name on /. -- I'm not suicidal), so I don't know how well it'd stand up to heavy usage.

Anyone else have any experiences with using Coranto (with or without iSay...iSay is alpha after all, and not entirely Free-as-in-speech), especially on a high-traffic server?

Noticably absent is LiveJournal

[JeffTL]

I can scarcely think of any more scalable system than LiveJournal. (Free software under GPL, more info at FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory. For one person ranting about Howard Dean, perhaps, it is overkill -- that's more Moveable Type or whatnot's field. But if you are wanting two blogs, or three or four, or 3216504 and counting, LiveJournal would appear to be the simplest and most powerful way to do it. Also there are plenty of clients available...LiveJournal for Windows, Xjournal for OS X, and many others for all operating systems.

here's the problem with phpNuke

[SethJohnson]

As I mentioned above, the key weakness isn't the CMS (which is also what you are saying), but it's the third-party modules.

My site was running phpNuke 6.9 before some brazillian script kiddies showed up with an exploit that was found just three days prior in Coppermine (third-party photo album module).

phpNuke's architecture depends on the third-party modules to do their own input-checking & cleaning. It has a tremendous user community that is scrubbing the core CMS code, but the modules frequently are just coded by one or a few programmers, and then they lose support (eGallery). phpNuke would be much more robust if it provided libraries for the modules to access for checking input and also required text to go through this before the module code could work with it.

Finally, I would say that phpNuke is an example of where security through obscurity helps. phpNuke is SO common, that whenever an exploit is found, suddenly those brazillian script kiddies have a skeleton key that unlocks thousands of sites across the net. If your site DOESN'T use phpNuke, I'm not saying you won't get cracked, but at least you won't be on the radar screen of these kids.

Re:here's the problem with phpNuke

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again though this is YOUR FAULT. If you don't want to keep up with security updates and issues, expect to get hacked!! That's a no brainer...if you keep up with OS security issues, why the heck wouldn't you keep on top of issues in the software your site runs/ran!?

Re:here's the problem with phpNuke

[Tracy Reed]

You are right but only to a certain degree. Of course one has to keep up on security patches because no software is perfect (except qmail which has never had an exploit in the many years I've been using it) but it is a lot easier to keep up on security when your CMS doesn't have a fatal exploit every other day. I seriously considered phpnuke but experimented with postnuke on the advice of friends. I found that even postnuke, while supposedly more secure, just wasn't as flexible or easy to use as I would like. I am now playing with zope/plone and I am very impressed. I've known about it for years but never really played with it. Now I have pretty much decided to move all of my sites over to this system.

A much more comprehensive comparison

[analogduck]

This comparison was done very well but it should be noted that there is a far more comprehensive and dynamic CMS / blog / portal application comparison chart at the CMS Matrix site.

You can also submit new software feature reviews and rate the software which is already there. ;)

LiveJournal rules!

[hackrobat]

Well, the software that runs LiveJournal.com (let's call it LiveJournal, because that's its name) rules. It's infinitely configurable, because for one, it is designed that way, and for another, it is open source. It can be deployed on any website. See the Hopkins Weblogs, for example.

See my weblog on LiveJournal.com. What more does a blogger want?

I'm surprised they don't mention LiveJournal in that blog software chart of theirs. I have evaluated Movable Type, and I think LiveJournal is better.

Re:Great site & Favs Drupal.org

[Anonymous Coward]

Drupal.

http://drupal.org/node/view/7857

Some of the MT folks are even discussing why they are switching to Drupal.

...and MT isn't listed.

[solios]

I can hardly look for a comparative upgrade path from MT 2.6 if it's NOT ON THE LIST. :|

COREBlog - Zope Weblog Product

[Domini]

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)

What are these weblogs of which you speak?

[tehcyder]

I seem to have missed them on the web so far.

Textpattern

[zeth]

I have been using Textpattern for a while now and I can't be happier. It does everything well, and is free. It has a nice administrator interface, and everything.

Hey, I sound like a commercial.

System with dual categortization?

[onnel]

I have a small travel site, mainly just a DB of entries for the places I've visited. What I really want is for every entry to have values in two categories: location and type (restaurant, nightlife, hotel, sight, etc...). I haven't found a system yet that will let me define different attributes (location, type) and sort/search by those. Someone should easily be able to see all entries for hotels in Budapest or for all hotels in the world. Any suggestions? I've currently got it up and runnong on Wordpress, but it really doesn't have the flexibility I want (right now I define categories for each location and sub categories for every type...less than ideal!). Onnel

Drupal PHPNuke, and PostNuke

[Edgester]

Too bad it doesn't mention Drupal, PhpNuke, PostNuke or some of the other fine CMS/blogging packages

SQL isn't always needed!

[WWWWolf]

Personally, I'm trying to start Yet Another Game-themed Blog. I was definitely thinking to use any of the widely-used engines, but there's just one problem with them: They need RDBMS (specifically, often only MySQL). My webhost can do MySQL but they charge extra for it (and, you know, being a PostgreSQL fan, it's kind of hard to accept that =). I wouldn't want to host this thing from my own box.

So, I'd just like to give some cheers to Blosxom folks. It's a very nice piece of software that doesn't need a RDBMS, is trivial to install and can also generate static pages. Sure, it doesn't have as much flexibility as some RDBMS-based things, but I wouldn't complain, it works wonderfully.

Now, if only I'd be able to come up with the content for the blog too... =)

phpNuke exploits are faster

[SethJohnson]

Again, I'm going to advocate that security through obscurity is superior to phpNuke.

With OS exploits, an admin can afford to be a few days, weeks, even months late in patching. Why? Well, unless the exploit is worm-capable, it takes the script kiddies a while to find all the servers that are running the exploit-prone OS. And even then, their attack will require a two-step approach if they have to have shell access to compromise the kernel.

If the exploit is in a phpNuke module, the script kiddies will simply google for the text in the module and hit your site right away.

Thanks for the recommendation of plone. I'll check it out!

Re:Other Free/Open Java blogging software and site

[WWWWolf]

since the article includes blosxom, people should also be aware of blojsom,

(The following is not intended as troll =)

THANK YOU. I always thought Blosxom was great software, but had a stupid name (I hate all of the millions of terms that have been derived from "blog"). Now I know there's a related app with even more stupid name, so Blosxom isn't that bad anyway.

Now all I need to remember how to spell it. S before X, I think? =)

Re:FIRST POST!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

FIRST POST! JOHN KERRY WILL KILL GEORGE BUSH IN THE NOVEMBER ELECTION!!!!!! (That's what the first post was supposed to say, was a little tipsy when writing it)

Project Steve Guttenberg

[Kevbo]

I've been using Project Steve Guttenberg primarily because it was the only one I could find at the time that didn't require a database backend' my 486 which was fine for serving static webpages just couldn't handle that load.
I never did find any others that did not require a database of some sort. I don't see the need for it when it's just a personal weblog. A site like /. of course needs one, but when I'm posting maybe 10-15 posts/month, and very few people are looking in the archives, it just didn't seem worth it.