Blog Software Smackdown

An anonymous reader writes "With published numbers saying there are approximately 70,000 new blogs being created each day, and the total number of blogs doubling every 5 months, it's no wonder that everyone and their dog is wondering whether to setup their own blog for a chance at fame, or perhaps a book publishing deal. The question then becomes: What software should you use? SitePoint has just published The Blog Software Smackdown which takes a look at Movable Type, WordPress, and Textpattern. Pick one, and take your stab at fame or notoriety."

Comments

Nanoblogger

[zecg]

Sheer elegance is nanoblogger. Truly minimal, console-friendly and GPL licensed.

I've used...

[under_score]

...three methods: plain old html/css, Movable Type, and Blogger. Each has distinct advantages and disadvantages:

• POHtml/css: ultimate in flexibility for layout and publishing. Pain in the butt to update and maintain.
• Movable Type: good balance between flexibility, built-in dynamic features and maintainability. Irritating to keep up-to-date for software versions, and a little slow for some of the dynamic features.
• Blogger: easiest to use by far. Nice integrated anti-comment-spam. Not very flexible in comparison.

For comments and trackbacks I use HaloScan. For pinging blog trackers I use Ping-O-Matic. I don't run any blogs that are super popular, but my Agile Advice blog has a good niche following with about 300 hits/day after six months of development. I've used Movable Type as a CMS system for my consulting/training web site too. It is flexible enough that I can make it do what I need for site layout, permanent (non-blog) articles, and the blog features are mostly turned off, except for publishing news items/announcements. I'm not a layout or graphics prodigy so I like the fairly simple default layouts provided by MT.

What about Drupal?

[ultralame]

OK. So it's a CMS. But it works great as a blog and is OSS. I have recently switched to it on my server, and it seems to handle everything better than Wordpress (I had a lot of spamming problems, and could never get the anti-spam additions to work). With drupal, I have had no problems with it or any of the modules I have installed. drupal.org

Re:What about Drupal?

[zootm]

I had a lot of spamming problems, and could never get the anti-spam additions to work

Try using this for Drupal, if the problem comes up again, I've been using it for a while and it's excellent.

Re:MS IIS C# .NET Blogging software ?

[nxtw]

There are a few.

DasBlog
BlogX
tBlogger
.Text

There may be others.

70,000 blogs per day?

[Regulus]

100 of which are legit, with the remaining 69900 being computer generated google-rank link-farms....

Typo.

[WWWWolf]

Typo is so far the greatest blogware I've seen. Was a little bit problematic to get running at first on my web host (they didn't have Ruby and Rails installed, had to build them from source), but it has been working like a dream ever since.

It has one really good side, specifically, it doesn't depend on any particular database. I'm using it on sqlite. Few blogwares offer that as an option. (Especially if nobody really reads my blog. =)

Has one annoying side though - relies on AJAX crap for preview when I type articles. Should file a bug report along the lines of "What's wrong with plain old preview-before-post?" one day...

Re:Slashcode? Yes? SlashGISRS.org?

[Lord Satri]

Are there any meaningful sites out there that run slashcode?

I'd like to believe so. http://slashgisrs.org/ - we're trying to be pertinent and useful. But since we're less than 2 months old, we don't have the readership /. gets. But we still have 6000 daily hits :-) It's very specific: for the geospatial community out there.

Normally, you can find other slashcode projects there: http://www.slashcode.com/sites.pl but this part of the site is down since the last slash-css update.

slashcode is *hard* to correctly install and setup. But it *is* a great tool once everything runs at a steady state :-)

Cheers!

cmsmatrix.org is where you can check them all out

[SensitiveMale]

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

You can read reviews and scores of over 100 blog types and can even compare up to 10 at a time.

A very handy and thorough site.

Livejournal previews lie.

[jbn-o]

Livejournal previews lie. The preview you get is not what your post will look like when it is posted to a blog entry.

Dotclear ?

[Ploum]

They forgot DotClear ( http://www.dotclear.net/en/ ). It's really a nice blogging tool, with a lot of plugins (I mean *a lot*) and a lot of available themes.

Give it a try, it worth it !

The only one with native video ...

[b0r1s]

Is vobbo

Sure, many people don't care about native video, but if you do, check us out.

Plain old HTML

[JanneM]

As far as I know, html/css is the only option if you don't have the ability to install and run anything on the server you have access to. I have a cobbled together perl app that allows me to write posts as text with some minimal markup, and translates it to proper html with links, image scaling and thumbnail creation, rss feed generation and so on, and moves it all up to the server using scp. The only thing I'm missing is the ability to have it indexed by blox indexers, but then, I'm not really writing for a larger audience anyhow so I don't much mind.

To me this is a good compromise - it's lean, easy to manage if there's a problem, and a static page loads real fast - and I've been surprised that there doesn't seem to exist any "real" tools for managing a static webpage-type blog like this.

http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren/log/current.htm l

Re:Write your own if you can

[knipknap]

Yeah, I would also like to see the security of the packages analyzed. I run Wordpress, and worked a bit on it's codebase to get it running. What I saw looks quite scary, security was apparently not much considered. For example, they have globals sprinkled all over the place, which makes checking such things real hard. (Also, if somebody has register_globals switched on, it gets *really* hairy.)
Honestly, I don't expect much more from similar other products however.

While the article also rates the product in a category they call "Security and spam-blocking", all products, including Wordpress, are fairly highly rated (MovableType got only 3 out of five). Also, spam and security are barely related, which makes me question the value of that rating even more. I am aware that security can not be rated easily, but overall, the article does not make me too confident that they did any actual security checks.

Re:MS IIS C# .NET Blogging software ?

[arose]

And if Blosxom appeals to you, but you're more of a Python person there is also PyBlosxom.

There's much better comparisons out there...

[daVinci1980]

I used the comparison over at asymptotic.net when looking for the blog software for my site. It compares pretty much everything under the sun, in a neat, well defined table with an excellent legend.

I think the breakdown there is a lot better than the one listed in the article. YMMV.

Moveable Type

[jelevy01]

I use moveable type at my http://www.quarterlifeliving.com/ blog... I tried WordPress (cause its free) and didn't meet my needs at all. It was way to simple. What I love about movabletype are the plugins, using the BigApi (or something like that, can't remember now) which allows you to modify almost ever UI component. I then using Ajaxify http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/plugin/ajax ify.html to get a AJAX wysiwyg editoring.. Tons of plug-ins come out all the time.. I love it.. Check out all the plug-ins here http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/all.html

Re:iBlog

[Anonymous Coward]

My time is getting extremely valuable these days and the less time I have to spend managing a blog package, the better.

Yet you still waste your day away posting to slashdot like the rest of us with devalued time.

Re:typical iBlog

[Anonymous Coward]

Overrated. You are just parasitizing off of the parent post because he was first post. If you go to his blog, you will actually see that there is a considerable amount of science, and beautiful photography. Far more useful and informative content than 99% of blogs out there.

Re:iBlog

[pvera]

iBlog is only good if you are an occasional blogger. Once you have more than two dozen posts it becomes unmanageable because it is 100% static HTML. This means that if you have 50 articles and you change the template you are forced to upload all 50 articles again, plus supporting files.

What you want is something simple like Wordpress. Wordpress 1.5 already uses the nofollow tag, so you don't have to worry about comments spam. Whoever tries to auto spam you is not going to get any advantage out of it. All you have to do is once a month or so check your list of comments and delete whatever you don't like.

I get paid to do this stuff, recently.

[Anthony Boyd]

Ever since a year ago, when I was laid off, I've been contracting for companies who need CMS software. I've tried a LOT of them at this point.

Agitar Software uses Movable Type to power their site. It's a corporate site, not really a blog. I added a boatload of PHP statements to the MT templates, so that it would provide i18n (the pages get generated with PHP code in them, then they become dynamic PHP files on the server). Unfortunately, we don't do much with the i18n yet. No matter what you pick, it's in English. But we've got a translation firm on the hook, so that will change. I also work on Developer Testing, which is far, far more bloggy (also uses MT).

Mill Valley Film Festival uses Drupal. It isn't really bloggy, but on the backend, that's how it works. There are a few "blogs" available (such as "Film Listings"), and the staff add in entries. I also have just started a very basic drupal blog for my daughter's class.

I have a boatload of other blog-like sites I maintain (mostly using Mambo & Joomla), and I've even open-sourced some software to turn phpBB into a blogging system.

So, with some credentials out of the way, here's my impressions.

First, Movable Type is archaic, even with the new 3.2 update. It's great for old-school Web publishing, where the main players know a few HTML tags and dynamic publishing isn't terribly urgent. Yes, MT can do dynamic publishing, but there are other systems that do that waaaaayyy better. So its strength is more along the lines of "update & release, update & release."

It has hard-coded fields, but you can muck around with them (moreso in 3.2). We use those fields for features that don't really tie into the fields anymore. For example, when a user wants to control the URL of an entry, he/she fills out our keywords field. It's just how the solutions have evolved.

I think MT is weakest at looping through entries. The entire scoping system is arbitrary. Some plugins sometimes return global loops, other times narrowly-scoped loops, which can be really not-fun to learn about. Overall, Movable Type seems to me to be a workhorse, reliable, but old and no longer well-devised.

Drupal is very frustrating. The template system is rigid. The PHPTemplate plugin helps. I used it exclusively on mvff.com. But it still requires a huge investment into figuring out how it works. In some cases, I ended up posting support questions and then later answering them myself on drupal.org -- partly because the forums are quiet, and partly because I was pushing the system waaaayy more than the bulk of users do. But what's surprising is that I wasn't doing much. You can see that from mvff.com -- it's just a film Web site. It's not highly sophisticated. If you're going to be building a typical site and the system requires so much tweaking that you become a bleeding-edge pioneer for it, that's a bit much. Drupal is too technical for the average blogger.

What Drupal does well is the plugin system. A default install of Drupal comes with a boatload of plugins. Want forums? Just click a button. Want blogs? Click a button. Want an image gallery? Click a button. For example, with the school blog that I built using Drupal, I went with almost all of the defaults, and it was a lot easier to setup. It took maybe 3 hours from start to finish. It also looks really plain and doesn't do much, however. And I'm still having trouble getting the TinyMCE HTML GUI to work properly on that system. I don't know why yet.

Joomla seems to be the best of both worlds -- a fair balance of tradeoffs on the technical side, but also a backend control pa

go Drupal

[rmm4pi8]

I was looking for something similar, and I think in the end you're going to end up with either Mambo or Drupal. Mambo has friendlier forums and seems easier to get going, but Drupal is better architected for growth--both of features and of userbase. Both are actively developed. If you have questions about Drupal before you start out or need help installing it, feel free to drop me an email.

Drupal does everything you want out of the box, except in order to get different style-sheets for each blog you'd have to upload the stylesheet yourself and set it as usable--but that's perhaps desirable as a security feature anyway, otherwise your users could be writing their own javascript without oversight.

Hope that helps, and good luck to you no matter what you choose.