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."

CityDesk

[tomblackwell]

You can also manage a site quite nicely with CityDesk [fogcreek.com], 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.

my own?

[ferrocene]

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.

Re:my own?

[Simon (S2)]

Seriously, have any other /.'ers created their own system?

Yes, I did. A si [4k1r4.ath.cx]mple gallery script I took from somewhere on the net and modified it to fit my needs. There is a cron job launching a perl script that downloads mails from a mailbox and puts the attachments on the gallery and the body of the mail under the image on the web page.
Very simple, but allows me to blog from my mobile phone.

CMS Specifically for Writers?

[Landaras]

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 [fallinggrace.com])

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

The best one I had

[jb.hl.com]

...I wrote myself.

Two PHP scripts, plus an additional, .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 [xmission.com] it's good enough for me :)

Drupal

[Anonymous Coward]

After a long months of searching and attempting to find the right CMS software I finally found Drupal, and find it to be the best by far of all those I looked at.

The CMSes that I looked at are Slash, PHPSlash, Mambo (which BTW, is very good but not for community weblogs like slashdot), PHPNuke, and PostNuke.

I have found Drupal to be technically superior to all of them. But what makes it even more attractive to me is the fact that the community developing it is very open, active, and polite. There is a lot of communication from Dries (the guy who started the project) as well as the rest of the developers. New versions come out frequently.

Drupal is so much better than PostNuke, which is what I had been using to run my site for months. The postnuke community has no central disscussion board it seems, as well as no direction. It almost seemed dead when I abondoned it.

Re:Why just blog?

[ichimunki]

Yep. Wiki is my preference, although I use a somewhat modified UseMod [usemod.com] Wiki (I have tried TWiki in the past and found it a bit too much-- plus, IIRC, it has kinda goofy markup compared to what you see most places).

The biggest thing I found lacking in UseMod was the ability to have a little "front page" blurb about recent changes, so I hacked one up. This allows the front page to contain links to my journal entries and keep visitors up to speed on the important stuff that's new since last visit. I have some other plans for additional hacks... and one that just occurred to me that would be really handy is a way to build photo galleries just using the Wiki.

how about a blog software that doesn't require sql

[whizkid042]

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.

Re:LiveJournal

[moosesocks]

Even better...

Use the LiveJournal servers, but syndicate the RSS feed into your own blog.

This way, you can get the best of both worlds, allowing you to intergrate the blog into your own site while using all of LJ's kickass features such as the huge array of WYSIWIG clients availible. It cannot be beaten.

Re:Great site & Favs

[dealsites]

This is not a troll, but I've seen tons of these sites suffer from a slashdotting. Now I understand that the Slashdot crowd can deliver quite a punch, but many of these Open Source CMS systems have too many mysql database queries per page. That will reduce your capacity even further than bandwidth. Especially on a popular shared hosting plan. I'm a huge Postnuke fan and I usually have about 25 people on my site at a time (max), and one day got slashdotted. I saw the number of users grow to about 350 online at one time (based on a 5 minute interval). The page slowed down some, but I was suprised that it stayed up the whole time.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure how MANY people it actually takes to bring down a page, but this was a huge number of visitors for my site. Anyone know how many people are on Slashdot at any given time?

--
New deal processing engine online: http://www.dealsites.net/livedeals.html [dealsites.net]

Client Side Weblog Editor

[bblfish]

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 [java.net]'s BlogEd [java.net]. 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.

Re:LiveJournal

[abartlett_219]

LJ is one of the most powerful blogging systems out there. Fairly painless to set up (i got it working with gentoo in under an hour, debian is just apt-getting the packages and perl modules). If it can handle a 2 million+ user system (some closed source stuff, but most of that is not needed for your daily blog). And they are making tons of progress with FotoBilder, their open source photohosting service. Brad and co. has made a heck of a system Plus the LJ ethics are pretty good too (in the LJ social contract they state no ads ever!)

Another one not mentioned

[X-Nc]

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.

Re:LiveJournal

[rmarll]

Which is kind of strange since it didn't even make it into the first 10 systems reviewed.

Re:Great site & Favs

[mabinogi]

The trouble with OpenSourceCMS is that it only lists php CMSs
What I want in a CMS is both the ability to use without touching any code, and the ability to extend it. But if extending means having to touch php then I don't want to go near it.

Plone (a Python / Zope based CMS) is nearly perfect, but it's really......really......slllooow. I've been trying to find something else like it preferably Java based, but just about any language other than php would do, but I haven't had much luck.

Re:Why WordPress Is Poised To Take Over

[Jordy]

I'm sticking with MT myself.

I don't really want to run MySQL. I don't really want to maintain it. It is just not something I want to deal with. MT lets me use a little local database.

I really really don't want dynamic pages. I just don't need it. I have had zdnet link to my blog which caused a trillion avantgo clients to hit it. I just don't need queries to MySQL and PHP being run all the time. Actually PHP by itself wouldn't be so bad if it cached everything in a local file the first time the page required it as long as it supported if-modified-since and ranges correctly.

I actually kind of like the idea of TypeKey. Of course nothing prevents you from implementing TypeKey support in WordPress.

I simply don't care about silly licensing issues. I mean, for a single non-commercial blog, nothing has changed.

I have an upgrade path. Sooner or later WordPress will probably integrate a local databse and real caching. When that happens if it is better than MT, I'll migrate. I just don't see the point in migrating right now.