bloggers? -- looking for a good one

[tekky]

I got a friend thats using this one blogger and its turning out to be quite gay... it requires a special program for editing your html files... and then it uses Jscript for the comments section so it doesnt work on non jscript browsers (ie. disabled like my work forces us to do)....

she wants it fully customizable, but from what I've seen thats a rarity... so my question... and by fully I mean the program inserts variables into the html files and the blogger parses those out and replaces them with the right info... however its also buggy....

what bloggers do you use, and what do they offer option wise?

any suggestions?

[Elizabeth]

I use Wordpress; it has quite a bit of functionality built into it, and the default look is passable. Unfortunately I haven't had 2 seconds to customize mine a whole lot, but if she knows anything at all about CSS she shouldn't have a problem making it her own. Also, because this seems to be one of the more popular ones out there, the support is pretty good as well as the hacks/plug-ins.

[weekender]

yeah, i also use wordpress. Not got it live yet, but re-templating it on my laptop.

really easy, there are a great many hooks and template tags and the dev wiki is well stocked.

version 1.5 came out about two weeks back, now bundled with Kubrick (from the excellent http://binarybonsai.com) as the default theme. Michael Heilemann is about to release Kubrick2 in a few weeks, which should be a great improvement on a wicked theme. I've also found the theme is a great base to create your own from.

as liz said, there are also some great plugins and hacks, notably wp_amazon - which makes it easy to insert amazon images using amazon web services

[piersk]

I myself use movable type (http://www.movabletype.org). Its an awesome piece of software (not the easiest to set up, but fairly straightforward). It can be used for a basic blog, but also see here (http://www.about.com) to see what can be done (yes that entire site is done using MT)

From a customisation point of view, I've found MT to be the easiest as there's no querying of the database to do (it basically outputs static files, but can output dynamic pages) and it's just a case of using tags.

[tekky]

Thanks Liz, piersk, and weekender, gonna have my friend check out each of those, although I must say piersk, reading about MT, it does sound pretty cool.... and sounds similiar to what she was using in the past... just not as buggy...

Thanks again!

[vaaaska]

Don't use MovableType...trust me...

Wordpress and TextPattern are where it's at...don't forget about ExpressionEngine as well...

TextPattern was created by Dean Allen who lives in southern France. He's the man who created Textile (a regular expressions html coding system) that is used in many other blog systems (even MT) and is the big man at TextDrive. If you don't know what TextDrive is you should check it out...an amazing community of people who love the web, programming and general stuff like that. They have quite a web celebrity list of people working for and with them...

**** The next release candidate will be out very shortly and version 1.0 in March apparently.

http://www.textdrive.com/
http://www.textpattern.com/

[ajdegans]

www.zerocom.ath.cx/project.php

[piersk]

Originally posted by vaaaska
Don't use MovableType...trust me...

Just out of question (everyone has their fave software), why do you say this? I've become quite proficiant at using it and most of the features, so I'd be interested to hear your opinion.

[ajdegans]

indeed a motivation for such a statement would be nice :)

[vaaaska]

You don't have to believe me, but you will see people move away from MT. That is, people who expect a reliable high-quality product. It's not that their product is not good already, it's that they have cast their net and now need to focus upon reeling it in (large profit). There already are, and will soon be even more, better alternatives.

Their purchasae of Livejournal...uhhh...a small company gets bigger and then deals with real headaches. I'm not the one to say it, but many have said they will become the MS of these blogging systems in years to come. Not sure about that, but I don't see how they can compete at the speed things are going right now (people have caught up and are passing them).

Some of their bright, shiny stars have left to work on other systems already.

[piersk]

See, you say that people are moving away from MT because it's not a high quality product? Why is it not? I've never had any problems with MT.

Admittedly I don't know about using it commercially as this would involve paying lots of money, but I would use it for definate if they weren't charging for it.

However, one thing I have noticed is that even tho they say that you are only allowed 1 user and 3 blogs on the personal (and free) edition, there is nothing in the software that restricts it to this.

[tekky]

Well just for refernce sake I got my friend setup using cutenews (www.cutephp.com) I had to check it out when trying to help a user here with their problem and it seemed like what she was looking for... so after I did a few minor hacks to some of the php docs for her, she's happily going about her business again with her "journals"