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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

Also, side-by-side CMS comparison matrix

[Brent Nordquist]

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

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.

slashdot's journal

[cheese_wallet]

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

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

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.

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: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: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.

snipsnap

[bblfish]

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

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: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.)