Free Blog Software Available On The Market Today
A software can be defined as a set of programs that help us do a specific task. Going by that definition, a blog software is a collection of programs that assist us in the creation and management of a blog. More formally, a blog software (or blogware or weblog software) is a software that contains specialized content management systems for creating and maintaining blogs. Blog softwares can be broadly classified into 2 categories: user hosted and developer hosted. Most free and open source software fall under the former category. This article reviews some of the free blog software that is currently available on the market.
Apache Roller
This Java based free blog software was written by Dave Johnson in 2002. It attained fame at FreeRoller.net and it now drives top level clients like Sun Microsystems, IBM DeveloperWorks, the Javalobby community site and numerous other blogs all over the world. Roller supports almost all blogging features such as group blogging, RSS feeds, rich text editing, user defined customized templates, comments, trackbacks, referrers, blogroll and a lot more. It also provides a robust XML-PRC interface for clients like Ecto. This free software is now in the process of becoming an Apache licensed project and is currently a constituent component of the Apache Incubator Program.
b2Evolution Another free blog software that supports multiple users and multiple languages is b2Evolution. This system is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database for its implementation. Its major stronghold is its ease of installation and easy extensibility to plug-ins and add-ons of any sort. Some of the popular plug-ins that have been introduced are Textile, Auto-P, Greymatter, BB code, Texturize and many others. Customization is extremely easy. Another strength that merits special mention is the advanced searching capabilities. This lets the user browse through his or her archives and that of others in the blogosphere. It has been registered under a GNU general public license and comes at no cost. It can be made to run on one's own domain or website and it offers all the usual blog tools and facilities such as image uploading, spell checking, bookmarking, automated pinging and a lot more. For more advanced users it offers equally advanced features such as multilingual blogging, protected posts, skin switching, time-zone handling, integrated statistics and much more. bBlog This is another free blog software that has its roots in PHP and is backed by a MySQL database for implementation purposes. The bBlog free blog software was started by Eaden McKee to estimate the capability of the Smarty templating system. It is a free, open source software that is under the GNU general public license. The features that give this free blog software an edge over its other free counterparts is the ease of modification of look and functions. Blosxom Pronounced 'blossom', this free blog software has been coded in Perl and uses traditional file storing systems rather than a database management system. Written by Rael Dornfest, it finds immense popularity and support in Japan. The features that this free blog software boasts about are its simplicity, usability and interoperability.
Apart from the aforementioned three free blog softwares, one can also try other available options such as PyBlosxom, Dotclear, Drupal, Elgg, Livejournal and the like.
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