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....

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.

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.

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.

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.