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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."
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
Left 4 Dead Gaming Group - http://www.l4dgg.com
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.
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.
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.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Easy to use/set-up, GPL license, and good (not perfect) XHTML strict compliance. Check it out if you have access to php/mysql
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
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.
-twb
at The CMS Matrix; you can pick up to 10 you want to compare.
Brent J. Nordquist N0BJN
Sorry about the WordPress.org site guys, I'm doing my best to bring it up ASAP.
.. so I wrote my own ;)
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.
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WAP porn
I don't use it myself, but it seems that slashot's journal is essentially a free blog.
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.
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
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:
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.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
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.
{{.sig}}
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.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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.
Read my blog.
See blosxom... Same thing. Edit a text file and it is "published."
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.
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.
They are missing SnipSnap, an fantastically easy to install java GPLd blog/wiki server. Try it out at snipsnap.org.
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.
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.
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.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
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.)
-- Alastair