Wordpress Blog

WordPress is comparatively more lightweight than many of its siblings. It is a feature-rich, well-structured blogging engine that has a huge user base. You will find the documentation of WordPress is some of the best documentation ever made. You will also get a very quick response from its user community to any problem you may ever have. There are thousands of contributors who are regularly developing plug-ins and themes. So if any lack of feature is found, you can easily find some good plug-ins to remedy it. Moreover, as a worst-case scenario, if you can't find any plug-in that fulfills your need, you can develop one on your own with the help of the state-of-the-art documentation and plug-in API of WordPress. Installing, administering, and maintaining your blog with WordPress is so easy that you require no previous blogging experience to deliver a world-class blog.

Textpattern Blog

Textpattern (http://www.textpattern.com/) is another lightweight blog engine that is compatible with plug-ins. Its main goal is to be a general-purpose CMS system. Textpattern supports multi-lingual blogging via UTF-8. Its feature-richness and easy administration makes it a very strong competitor to WordPress. Textpattern is developed by Dean Allen and is available on the market since early 2001.

Nucleus CMS Blog

Nucleus CMS (http://nucleuscms.org/) is also a popular content management system. It is actually more than a blog engine. Nucleus supports a multi-lingual and multi-author blogging environment. Some other extensive features are the availability of a huge number of templates and plug-ins, an easy administration panel, easy syndication support, etc. Nucleus exposes a rich set of APIs to extend it via plug-ins. Administration of Nucleus is more complicated than that of other blog engines.

b2evolution Blog

One of the greatest features offered by b2evolution (http://b2evolution.net/) is multi-user blogging, which is also present in WordPress via WordPress MU. This means you can host a single blog, but it can be used by multiple users as separate entities. b2evoution features auto-installation with minimum hassle. It's a feature-rich blog engine. One of the greatest drawbacks of b2evolution is the lack of themes and plug-ins. Its administration panel is rich but very confusing. It is comparatively heavier than WordPress.

Drupal Blog

Drupal is actually used as a content management system but was originally written by Dries Buytaert as a bulletin-board system. It's a system with very strong architecture featuring plug-ins and themes. Drupal has a huge user community and excellent documentation. Since Drupal's main goal is not blogging, it has plenty of modules that are best suitable for a website. Moreover, Drupal has modules like e-commerce, photo gallery, CVS integration, and mailing list manager. Mailing list manager is a feature through which you can manage a group of users and send mails to them. The Drupal administration panel is quite heavy and confusing for new bloggers. In the real world, there are different modified distributions of Drupal among which CivicSpace is a notable one.

boastMachine Blog

Another promising open-source blogging engine that recently came into focus is boastMachine (http://boastology.com/). It features rating of posts, a spam filter, an image manager, etc. By default, all these features are also available with WordPress via plug-ins. boastMachine is a lightweight engine. The main drawback of boastMachine is its incompatibility with plug-ins. Being comparatively new to the blogging market and maintained by a single user, boastMachine lacks a large user community and online help.

Serendipity Blog

Serendipity, often called s9y, is a strong competitor to WordPress. It is feature-rich, smooth, and well structured; so no one can skip it at a glance. However, the main problem of s9y is the lack of plug-ins and its heavy weight. s9y takes more bandwidth and time to serve its content than WordPress. However, Serendipity is a neat and very nice blogging tool for those who expect something more than just a blog. In Serendipity, you will have full control over plug-in development and management. This blog engine is compatible with different kinds of database servers like MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. You will find Serendipity at this URL: www.s9y.org.