Three blogging alternatives to Wordpress

Since its advent in 2003, WordPress has climbed its way swiftly up the popularity ladder – almost to the point that most bloggers have overlooked or forgotten about its competition. Here are some alternatives to WordPress to suit your needs.

WordPress.com

WordPress.com is a sister site of WordPress.org. Here’s a comparison between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

Tumblr and Blogspot

Tumblr and Blogger Blogspot are two of the most popular alternatives to WordPres. Here’s a post to help you choose between Tumblr or WordPress and between Blogger and WordPress.

Movable Type

Movable Type (MT) was here before WordPress (WP). Many regard it as old school, but it still works. Six Apart developed Movable Type in 2001 with abilities to:

Host multiple weblogs and standalone content pages
Manage user roles
Have various and pleasing, customizable templates
Manage files, user roles, tags, categories, and trackback links
Support static page generation, dynamic page generation, or a combination of the two

MT has a few advantages over WP. For example, if you’re working multiple blogs, you’ll want to consider MT since you need a new installation of software for every blog you want to manage with WP. You can get a multiple user version of WP but this can either cost you money and/or time.

WP, on the other hand, deals with comment spam better; it comes out of the box with the Akisimet spam filter plug-in. MT has similar plug-ins but WP’s plug-in requires less effort. On that note, you can find plug-ins a little bit easier if you’re working with WP, thanks to the open source architecture that makes what you want easier to find, although just barely.

Also, consider cost: WP is free; so is MT, as long as you’re in it for personal use. For commercial, nonprofit, or education uses (or any other), you’ll have to dish out at $50 and upwards of $1,000 depending on how many users you’ll have. WP also has easier installation, although not by much, and both are equally user-friendly.

WP is probably a safer, user-friendly bet than MT, but because the call is so close, users should at least check out MT. If you’re sick of WP for whatever reason, MT just might do the trick.

Habari

Habari distinguishes itself from other blogging software by a number of technical advantages as well as its model of community participation. Users who contribute work of a certain quality gain more privileges within the project, according to its website (and its faithful following).

Conveniently for current WP users, Habari features importers for Serendipity (another blogging software) and WP as well as allowing for multiple authors and multiple sites on one installation. Other features include:

Support for multiple database backends (MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL)
Protects against SQL injection attacks.
Modular, object-oriented core for easy extensibility
Media silos to directly access various ways of media storage, like Flickr
Atom Publishing Protocol support
Support for static content
Plugins
Tagging

Recently, the feud between Habari and WP has been compared to Apple versus PC. Like Apple, Habari provides a more elegant computing experience. It is also less cluttered; WP is notorious for overwhelming users with unnecessary information the user can then remove, but Habari has no clutter to begin with. It is still a young software, however, with a young community with fewer plug-ins than WP. Try it if you’re sick of WP’s information overload.

TextPattern

Dean Allen originally aimed for TextPattern (TP) to be a high-quality but general-purpose content management system to be utilized for any number of projects (in many different languages), not just blogging.

Similar to Habari, TP works a privilege-based user hierarchy to promote high-quality, organized writing, editing, and publishing. This is not to say the process is limited to experienced bloggers and the like; a text-to-HTML converter called Textile permits users to publish without in-depth knowledge of HTML as well as preview the final product of a post or project and its XHTML before publication. Other features include:

a MySQL database backend
a tag-based template system
a commenting system as well as spam-fighters
referrer tracking and other site statistics
a built-in CSS editor
an integrated image management system

Although some users find TP’s admin interface less attractive than WP’s (and a little bit harder to work around at first), TP boasts a very efficient and convenient Article system that allows you to post articles anywhere and use Forms to present them to your desire.

TP is also very flexible and has no problems installing or using its many plug-ins. Meanwhile, WP can be a bit inflexible and has a huge cache of plug-ins that don’t deliver on their promises. Many bloggers sick of the bugginess of WP have converted to TP.

A guest post by Maria Rainier, freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, researching areas of online colleges & blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop. Want to guest post on HowToMakeMyBlog? See more info here.