Still evaluating GPL blog tools. Tonight I tried sunlog and b2. Both offer the usual bells and whistles such as trackback, pings, rss alternates, based on templates and stylesheets, xmlrpc. Here's a brief first-thoughts review on each:
- sunlog
pretty sparce in the documentation; supports 'englisch' and german, and i18n is at least intrinsic to the design. Installs itself once given the mysql database, but I couldn't get past the login screen; just cycles back to the login with the correct password. No diagnostics in the logs. that seemed a good indication it wasn't worth pursuing the login problem. three stars.
- b2
A very elegant blog if you can do with different pages for each categoryall categories showing up on the mainpage; I want the main page to track some categories, other categories to be on their own page (such as personal blogs). It's small enough I might be able to do what I want by keeping distinct tables and scripts for each sub-blog.
The template language is stripped down by having all tags done as inline PHP -- after all, why re-parse something that PHP is already parsing?
lots of features in a tiny package. you can also do different styles for any number of pages since all you do is create PHP pages that call the various methods to fill in the data.
File layout is a bit ugly, with all of the files in your root directory instead of done as PHP include modules. If I did run multiple blogs, it's not clear if it's possible to have them all share parts or if it has to be a complete installation (probably just need to hack some paths since its just PHP include statements to 'include' a plugin file.
no page caching, which means it's not a good choice for anyone who's likely to get slash-dotted.
I'm evaluating the phpSlash next; it looks promising, but has an awkward non-SGML tag syntax that's going to be a pain.