DotClear: French Blogware - PeopleBait: Practical Internet Marketing Advice for 2006

37|DotClear: French Blogware

March 18th, 2006 by Marcel Ursprung

http://www.dotclear.net

DotClear’s native unicode support makes it one of few truly multi-national blogging tools. Although it can easily integrate into any language, it has not picked up much support from english bloggers. DotClear has been widely adopted by the large french speaking blog community in Europe, with emerging support from Germany and Spain. The default version is english with mandatory french support. The language can be changed on the user level.

Olivier Meunier who was hired by Mozilla Europe in 2005, developed and still maintains DotClear. It was intended as a slim, simple to use blogging tool extended by plugins for all non-essential features. It is developed in PHP/MySQL and distributed as open source under the GNU General Public License.

Since the majority of users are french, the english documentation for plugins are sketchy at best. Making it uninviting to the english speaking audience, which is unfortunate because this blogware is well developed, easy to use and intuitive.

DotClear has a few notable unique features. It comes with a bookmarklet so you can blog by clicking the “Blog this!” button on your browser toolbar. It also has a notes section for each entry, a simple scratch pad, for your private thoughts or resources related to the post.

The editor is all text, with 2 styles of code either HTML or Wiki (simplified markup). It has some helpful markup buttons, but no WYSIWYG editor. Trackbacks are supported but not pingbacks. Each post has an abstract content section for the short post introduction. Standard comments and single level post categories are also supported.

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