The Blog Platform War – Not Over Yet?

By Chris GarrettBlogging

I while ago I wrote a long series of blog software reviews here for performancing. Time has flown, as it does, and I was wondering if the same sorts of results would be found now as then.

Back then Drupal and WordPress came out strong. There were also a good number of well known and not-so well known names.

Between then and now I have concentrated purely on WordPress after giving up trying to keep abreast of the Drupal goings on (those guys really crank out some code!).

Each have been given several iterations, the software is both familiar now and new from back then.

Recently MovableType had a resurgence of interest since going back to open source.

So is it a one-horse race or is there still everything to win for any one of the platforms out there?

Would you re-score any of those results knowing what you know now?

8 thoughts on “The Blog Platform War – Not Over Yet?”

  2. No WordPress. For me WP is like Microsoft. Point.

    • My resident system is Textpattern. Always astonishingly well doing as a small CMS and a beautiful structured blogging platform.
    • Played around with Pivot. Great for easy multi blog publishing. Needs no database!
    • Dropped Drupal. I don’t get the structure into my head. Somebody has to pay well for developing time because that is what every Drupal project massively needs.
    • Following the MovableType blog. Still waiting for a project.
    • Also still following the LiveType development. Great for independent multiple blogs with user generated content in sub-domains.

    Still maintaining some Blogger blogs for myself and friends. The easiest choice for low level blogging without hassle.

  3. Blogger is solid with a great infrastructure behind it (and more useful since you could use your own domain name), WordPress has the extensibility and large community, Movable Type has the history and another community and Drupal is the geeks darling (well, those geeks who can work it out).

    Two names that come to mind immediately are Mambo and Joomla. Both are very solid CMS setups (in my limited experience anyway) and have that extensibility that WordPress users like while being more suited to the whole CMS experience (WordPress is good as an ‘extended blog’ but push it too hard and it will fall over).

    I understand ExpressionEngine and TYPO3 are also excellent.

    A CMS might be overkill if all you want to do is have a blog (in which case Blogger or WordPress.com or Typepad or selfhosted WordPress will be enough). If you want to do more, a look at a CMS might well be worth a look.

  4. I started on Movable type and when they went to version 4 I started getting all sorts of 500 errors that I could never fix. I have moved most of my blogs over the last 6 months or so to wordpress and really leveraged the plugins and am happy.

    Haven’t yet upgraded though to 2.5 as I don’t like the interface and there is nothing driving me there

  5. I started with WordPress, which I use for my main blog/website. But frankly, I found some very well-known WordPress themes to be entirely unsupported, with almost mystically obscure, or horribly messy, CSS. Tried – hold your seat – TypePad for a while and loved it. It may cost $15 to get complete customizability, but if you simply want to write and not worry about the code crap, it’s perfect – beautiful. I subscribe to several excellent blogs that use Blogger, but my experience with B was unfortunate – entire article categories disappeared, and of course there isn’t any support worth mentioning. But I’ve come back to WordPress, which is well supported by my Web hosting company, GoDaddy, which allows me to post more blogs than I can handle, for just $9 per month.

  6. I’m still with Drupal. IMHO Drupal will eventually catch up with WordPress plugins and themes.

  7. Strobist.com is based on blogger and he does gangbusters.

    For me though I really need my WP plugins

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