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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.
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.
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.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
"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."
Best Windows Freeware
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.
That $3.95 a month for 1GB of capped data transfer seemed like such a bargain at the time....
Have you Meta Moderated t
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
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.
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
Have you forgotten how to scroll right or does your intarweb not download enough hours for you?
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.
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).
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
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
...I wrote myself.
.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 :)
Two PHP scripts, plus an additional,
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
I don't use it myself, but it seems that slashot's journal is essentially a free blog.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Finding God in a Dog
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...
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
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
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.
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...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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.
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.
They are missing SnipSnap, an fantastically easy to install java GPLd blog/wiki server. Try it out at snipsnap.org.
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.
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.
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.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
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...)