ExpressionEngine Core

Richard

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http://www.pmachine.com/ee/pricing/

Put simply, pMachine's just released a free version of the single best blogging engine out there at the moment (I use the Commercial version on my site - I've used WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Mambo, GreyMatter, TextPattern, Blogger, and a few more, and I still paid a couple of hundred dollars for a license. I let that speak for itself). It's not one big headline feature, just the way it all works - multiple weblogs, template groups, the fact that you can basically do anything with your pages without the software getting in the way - every single page on my site is actually an individual weblog. When I add a review, I have custom fields for 'First published', the icon, the text, the straplines, all the rest of it, and the template sorts them out into the nice consistent look you see.

A bit like Movable Type, the personal edition comes with a couple of caveats: it has to be for a personal site, and non-commercial within that. From the looks of it, the only thing missing from the weblogging side of things are the tools to post from different platforms - no moblogging, no Meta support. And you can't plug the seperate Forum module into it (although from the looks of things, it doesn't have any form of site registration, so in practice you could stick anything from punBB to Beehive alongside it without any problems)

The only slight problem is that it will take time to learn how to use it. It's the same deal as Blogger, WordPress and the rest - you create an empty template and scatter the relevant template tags throughout - but the added complexity and freedom means that there are a lot of options to consider. There's no tech support, and worse, you can't post in most of the forums - but in most cases, whatever you need will be available with the search tool.

Still, it's a brilliant engine if you really want to have full control over your blog's capabilities. You'll need a server with a MySQL database and PHP to install it, but that goes without saying.
 
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Dawno

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Thank you Richard for posting this! I have an abandoned blog on my own domain and maybe this will help me recover it.

Can I PM you with all my annoying questions when I give it a try? :)
 

Richard

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Sure, although the domain name has nothing to do with it. Potted summary - every webpage is identified by a very long number number. Because these would be impossible to remember, we have domain names - effectively, when you punch one into your web browser, the system checks to find out what number that relates to on the web, and directs accordingly.

To run EE, you need a web hosting package (ie. not Geocities or Blogspot) with access to certain technologies: MySQL (the database) and PHP (the language it's written in), although you don't need to know or care about how any of them work. Like all content management systems, it can be a bit fiddly to set up - although for the most part you just follow a step-by-step process and copy in the technical bits (the name of your database, for instance).

I use EE 1.4 Commercial. It's basically the same technology, except with more features. I haven't tried Core, but if my reading of what it can do is accurate, you could do about 80-90% of what I have on my site with it.
 
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