Simple blogging platform

Question

I want to start and host my own blog. I have ideas for creating the website theme myself.

However, I would prefer to not create the actual engine behind the blog -- comments, creating posts, caching everything, creating and managing the post database, spam protection or CAPTCHA of some sort... basic blog features.

Honestly, I'm just hoping for something barebones that I can just do something like, <?php include('comment_list.php'); ?> where I want comments to show up on a post. Similar functions to that. (This is a little oversimplified, but hopefully it's understood what I'm getting at)

This may be a little far-fetched. I'm not looking for the ability to have plugins, themes or user sessions and things of that nature. Just post creation, comment creation and caching are the big things I'm hoping for.

I don't know if I can explain this any better. I'm just looking for the bare minimum.

Answer 1

Tumblr allows you to write your own custom design very easily, but they will host the blog for you.

For your needs, Wordpress ( http://wordpress.org/ ) sounds like the best to be used. check out the basic theme which wordpress gives you by default to get started with.

Answer 2

Just post creation, comment creation and caching are the big things I'm hoping for.

Around 2000 I wrote my own blogging application .NET. Like you say: making posts, having comments, archives, and the lot. However after a while I still moved to WordPress which I am using to this day.

So now I need to think on how to take your arguments away:

• I don't think WordPress provides much functionality you do not need. It provides blogging, comments and really has a focus on the blog part. The benefit is that everything you need is present in it including comment spam protection...
• All functionality that is not core is not in WordPress but is left to plugins
• It is not overkill: you need 1 sql db and the wp php files that is it, install takes 5 minutes
• YOUR example just "include('comment_list.php');" ... is what WP does... just look into a theme php file and you will find that exact line ...

Maybe you can elaborate what part of WordPress is overkill for what you need since from my point of view: I understand the php code behind it (only 2 directories: /admin and /include) (for admin stuff and includes to make the thing run) and I understand the basic sql schema behind it it's not that hard and maybe even the simpleness you are looking for.

Answer 3

You can use Jekyll. It's quite simple to set up. This code prints all the posts on your site:

{% for post in site.posts limit:5 %}
    <div>
       <h2><a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a></h2>
       <em>Posted on {{ post.date | date_to_long_string }}.</em> 
       {{ post.content }}   
       <hr/>
    </div>
{% endfor %}  

I use it for my blog. You can use my source code – hosted at github – for whatever you want if you end up choosing Jekyll. The code is on my github account.

http://nerian.github.com/ https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll

Answer 4

There are a couple of CMS platforms that were set up with this purpose in mind, such as Barebones CMS

If this doesn't meet your needs, it would also be worth investigating CMS Made Simple(PHP based), Wolf CMS (PHP based) or GetSimple (XML based).