This edifice is powered by WordPress but there are other open source blogging options out there and a number of these appear below. Also joining the list is the software that powers Wikipedia and a smattering of open source Content Management Systems. With regard to the latter, OpenSourceCMS is a good place to try them before you go about downloading them. For those having Python available on their web server and wanting more customisability than what you find on offer below, there’s always Django as well.
Though there seems to be a myriad of web publishing options out there at the moment, I’ll remain open to looking at whatever comes my way. For anything to be added here though, it will need to open source and allow self-hosting. The former criterion excludes options like ExpressionEngine or Perch even if there is a version available that is free of charge and I recognise that many like it. The latter constraint means that services like Blogger, SquareSpace, Tumblr or WordPress.com won’t be discussed here. Many may use these but this collection is meant for the do-it-yourself inclination that is in many of us. That never is to say that I look down on users of hosted publishing solutions because what you find here once started out on WordPress.com and, even today, I still have another active site on there.
Though there is an enterprise edition too, this is an open source Java-powered content and document management system. The community edition is available free of charge but the company behind this makes its money from the enterprise edition and the provision of support.
Difficult-to-disentangle CSS was what put me off this when I tried it. Otherwise, it’s an impressive offering but Textpattern’s greater simplicity gets my vote.
This seems to be that rare thing, a fully featured photo publishing platform for the web. Themes, comment handling and even shopping carts are all here so there’s no need to entrust your photos to Flickr and its kind if you’re not willing to build it all yourself.
There’s no MySQL needed for this since the storage medium is XML. Could be worth a look, then.
It’s tempting to wonder if there really is a need for another blogging tool these days but someone clearly has and this stripped-down offering is the result. If WordPress ever does something that really gets in my way, it might even be what I choose to use. Saying that, it has a little way to go until feature maturity is reached but that’s never to say that it’s not usable right now.
This was king of the blogging hill until it upset its users but it remains very much out there having users like the BBC. In spite of the fact that it’s been around for what now feels like an age, the Open Source edition is a recent development. That may have something to do with Six Apart’s focus of the enterprise market and paid blogging services.
This uses the Smarty templating engine as the backbone of its blogging capability and very well it seems to work too. Of course, there is the need to learn a new of doing things but that’s always the way with unfamiliar technology. In this case, it is the templating language that really supplies the learning curve though a day’s effort is all that’s needed to get going. With all that’s going for it, it’s a pity that the calendar widget (or nugget as these things get called in the Serendipity world) doesn’t stop when it should and lands you one month into the future! Let’s hope that they get as far as addressing that one.
You can base a CMS around XML and XSLT too on the evidence of this offering. Their claims regarding simplicity and ease of use aren’t things that I have had opportunity to test but there’s a PHP/MySQL backbone needed here too.
It may not feel as slick or as swish as others but I have made it do what I want for A Wanderer’s Miscellany. With its only Textile mark up language and the way that content is organised, it may come across as being more for technical folks but that can be tamed too. Plugins help on that front and I have grown to respect the flexibility. As you might have gathered, I like it.
Started out as a fork from b2 and is moving along a path from dedicated blogging tool to more general content management system. Though I am always concerned that some succeeding version will foist something upon me that I don’t want or need, it so far has avoided this state of affairs. That’s just as well given that it turns up on nearly every website that I now run.
It might seem odd to include a document management system in here but there’s something to be said for managing the content assets that sit behind a website too.