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

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: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!

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.

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.

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.

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.