Noah Grey developed and maintained GreyMatter until late 2002. The project was then handed down to it’s open source community. The forum was maintained by Richard Foshee (AKA FoshDawg) for some time, and later by Rob Arnold (AKA Linear) who announced on greymatterforums.com:

“I think GM is basically doomed, for the reasons listed above. After we get the current list of known bugs sorted out in a release, I don’t really have much interest in continuing to maintain it.”

The forum and it’s dedicated user community has kept GreyMatter alive with new hacks and mods to extend the stressed platform. Since 2004 all development has stopped on the project.

For it’s time GreyMatter had a myriad of features including:

• GreyMatter-Style (a proprietary text input style, since popularized and copied by other blogware)
• Comments
• Search
• File uploading
• Image manager (photo-blogs)
• Multiple authors
• User access permissions
• Customizable templates
• Calendar
• IE bookmarklet
• Karma voting (reviews)
• IP blacklist
• Activity log (with hack alert)
• Multilingual support (see languages)

Plugins have further extended the base feature set with modern must haves such as; categories, RSS feeds, trackbacks, post from email, and a spell checker, just to name a few. However still missing from the mix are blogrolls, a links manager, WYSIWYG editor, and an easy install process for beginners.

The install process requires some server knowledge (most likely Unix), including proper setup of the cgi scripts, file permissions, and file paths. It is not something to be attempted by the novice user. To make matters worse, GreyMatter only handles one blog, each additional blog requires it’s own installation. An excerpt from businessblogconsulting.com:

“On a scale of 1-10, 10 being the Geekiest of Geeks, I rate GreyMatter a 7 on the difficulty level. There is difficulty in its installation, and further difficulty if you are an HTML novice in dealing with its vast array of templates. Once you’ve mastered both, however, you will find GreyMatter very powerful.”

Being a PERL based platform, with static pages, means it requires rebuilds of the archives when you make significant changes to the templates. This process can put a big load on the server often leaving small web hosts “Kaput“.

The best advice is to look somewhere else for your blogging needs. Many former aficionados of GreyMatter have since switched to WordPress or Textpattern for their own blogs.

FireBlog CMS was developed by Alex Smith in PHP/MySQL. Version 0.3 was released in June 2005, quickly followed by version 1.0. Since then not much more has been done with the system. Supposedly there is a new CMS called Snowflake that will replace FireBlog, this based on a recent posting by Alex on TuxTalk.org.

“…This new version will be based on Snowflake, the successor to FireBlog, which is currently powering this site.”

FireBlog has a few basic features such as; a smiley parser, news posts, comments, links manager and basic user permissions. Some features that were planned but never released are; categories, a forum, RSS feeds, and a theme manager. I expect we will see these features in the new Snowflake CMS system when it is released.

I don’t recommend using this system in it’s current state, unless you are a fluent PHP/MySQL programmer. A minor change to a theme setting (a simple text value) can bring the whole system crashing down with no way to recover, unless you can change the database manually. Since FireBlog is open source it might come in useful as a basic framework in a future blogware project.

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.

Originally called “EZ-articles“, boastMachine was conceived sometime in December 2003 by, then 16 year old, Kailash (blog). It all started as a PHP learning exercise for Kailash Nadh from Kerala India.

“That was the time when I had just learned PHP. So basically, I was sitting there with nothing to do. Bling! I had an idea! I quickly opened my text editor, CuteHTML (my all time favorite), ran the Sambar webserver and started scribbling down php code. After long three hours, I finally came up with ‘EZ-articles’!”

Developed further, this project laid the foundations for version 1 of “bMachine“, later renamed to it’s full name boastMachine, and it’s current release.

boastMachine is open source (GPL) and written in PHP/MySQL. This is so far the only blog CMS that puts a smile on my face. While it’s not the most sophisticated system, it does have all the major features you would expect and it performs well. Overall it’s a visually attractive, nice, user friendly system, that makes blogging fun again. I you are currently using Blogger, but want to host your own blog, put this on your short list of possible replacements.

Here is a list of the supported features:

• Multiple blogs
• Multiple users and permission levels
• User profiles
• Multilingual (17 Languages)
• Unlimited categories
• Themes and smiley packs
• Template editor
• Spam filter and IP blocking
• Built in word filter
• Built in referrer log
• Built in link manager
• File manager with file uploads
• Post voting/rating system
• bbCode engine for text posts
• WYSIWYG editor for HTML posts
• Search engine friendly pages
• Title/Content post search
• Pingbacks / Trackbacks
• Comment image verification
• RSS and ATOM feeds
• Data backup system