BlogsWeek.com

Alfresco was founded in 2005 by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects.

Alfresco “is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. It couples the innovation of open source with the stability of a true enterprise-class platform. The open source model allows Alfresco to use best-of-breed open source technologies and contributions from the open source community to get higher quality software produced more quickly at much lower cost.”

Alfresco was launched in October 2005 and is now available under the GNU GPL (General Public License) in two flavors: Community, which is free and community supported, and Enterprise, which requires a paid support contract.

As its name implies, b2evolution is an evolution of b2/cafelog. It was started in early 2003 by François Planque because the development of b2 had been discontinued (and the official b2 successor, WordPress, had not yet been named).

“Key improvements on b2/cafelog include:

* Multiple categories and sub-categories
* Multiple blogs
* Displaying all feedback (comments, trackbacks and pingbacks) on same page
* Latest comments page
* Integrated XHTML validator: check that your posts/comments are valid XHTML and secure against cross site scripting
* Full internationalization (i18n) and several localizations (l10n) included. Toolkit to add your own translations provided.
* evoSkins (evolved blog skins): change the look & feel of your blog in a snap!
* Clean permalinks
* Draft status: hide posts until you want to publish them
* Private/Protected status: hide posts from non identified members
* Trackback and/or pingback on edit (multiple trackbacks/pingbacks allowed)
* Statistics based on logging of Referers, User Agents, etc… on blog pages and RSS feeds
* Comment and referrer spam prevention”

b2evolution is a PHP and MySQL application, released under the GNU GPL (General Public License).

bBlog is a “personal publishing system written in PHP and released as free, Open Source software under the GPL. It is a flexible but simple way to blog that works for blogging beginners, and can grow with users needs.

bBlog has not only the features you would expect from a modern blogging system, but also capabilities including comment spam prevention and threaded comments. Perhaps bBlog’s most distinctive feature is that it is built around the templating system called Smarty, which makes customizing your blog as easy as editing any web page, no programming skills required.”

bBlog is based on the MySQL database. Its first version, 0.4, was released in June 2003, and the latest available release is bBlog 0.7.6, released on July 18, 2005.

Currently bBlog is no longer actively maintained, and there are no plans to carry on with development. There was an attempt to resurrect the project (Loquacity 0.8 alpha1 was released on May 30, 2006), but no further progress has since been made.

Bitweaver was born in late 2003 when a developer, spiderr, created a new branch of Tikiwiki dubbed “spidercore”. From spidercore a new project was forked, initially called TikiPro and later bitweaver. Bitweaver evolved with the priority of being modular and faster than Tikiwiki, e.g. by making as few database calls as possible.

Bitweaver adopts the ADOdb database abstraction library and the Smarty template engine. All pages are XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant and rely on CSS for styling. Bitweaver requires PHP version 4.1.0 or higher, and is released under the GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

Note: I’m not tracking bitweaver’s release announcements here, because on their site I can’t find a release announcements archive nor the permanent link to any individual release announcement.

Blog:Cms, formerly known as Nucleus XE (eXtreme Edition), is a personal publishing system developed by Radek Hulán.

It includes weblog, forum, wiki engine, news aggregator and photo gallery components. Blog:Cms is a PHP – MySQL application requiring:

* MySQL 4.0 database (mysql), or MySQL 4.1 database (mysqli), or SQLite database (bundled with PHP 5.0), and

* PHP 4.0.6 or higher, including PHP 5.0.

Most core libraries are based on Nucleus CMS, while the forum component is based on PunBB, the photo gallery on Singapore Photo Gallery and the wiki engine on Dokuwiki. Blog:Cms is released under the GNU General Public License version 2.