The Blogging Software Dilemma

This site is beginning to grow and grow, and forward compatibility has lately been in my mind more. Several days ago this site passed twenty thousand unique visitors, and more than seventy thousand hits, since late August. I recently converted everything (except the photolog) to XHTML 1.1, which was nice, but it’s not the markup I’m worried about. My logging software hasn’t been updated for months, and the main developer has disappeared, and I can only hope that he’s okay.

What to do? Well, Textpattern looks like everything I could ever want, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be licensed under something politically I could agree with. Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around. The work would never be lost, as if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name. What should it do? Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?

Update, 2003-12-26: This became WordPress.

117 thoughts on “The Blogging Software Dilemma

  1. Matt,
    If you’re serious about forking b2 I would be interested in contributing. I’m sure there are one or two others in the community who would be too. Perhaps a post to the B2 forum, suggesting a fork would be a good starting point.

  2. That disappearing developer added a good deal of truly hitchcockian suspense to the whole history of WordPress. Is he alive, at least?

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  4. It’s pretty amazing to read this post and realize that it’s only been 4 years… Did I say only? That’s amazing! It feels like I’ve ALWAYS been running WordPress!

  5. Thanks Matt, WordPress is cool enough as it is but i think you can still make it better by doing it the Microsoft way like copying everything from Movable Type, Text Patten and the whole lot

    Then we can have the best of everything plus this has worked for Microsoft they are still on top now and probably will be

  6. Quite cool reading the post that started it all.

    Congrats on reaching birthday number 6 🙂

    Here’s to many more and keep up the incredible work!

  7. “Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?”

    What happened to ‘the parsing of TextPattern’? I have been dreaming of using WordPress with Textile or some kind of wikitext.

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