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* The Business of Software

We're about to launch our misv blog.

We originally thought of using the popular WordPress, however, with so many security vulnerabilities and the force to upgrade WordPress all the time we are now considering using other bloging tools.. but we don't know which one to use (we don't want a hosted service though).

We are looking for a simple, secure and self hosted, blogging tool.
 
Any ideas?

You could have it hosted on wordpress.com if you wanted to stick with wordpress. 

I run wordpress and the upgrades aren't hard - usually just download the distro and unzip it on top of the existing install, and you're done.

Pay for Movable Type.

Expression Engine?

If ASP.NET is an option for you then Graffiti http://graffiticms.com/ is good. I purchased a license and it is very easy to install/maintain. I own a couple of Community Server from the Telligent guys (the creators of Graffiti) - their software is really cool.

(No, I'm not associated with them, and, yes, I _paid_ for all my licenses)

Oh, and why I posted there about Grafffiti - they are running ad campaign "Wordpress Alternative" - which triggered this post :)

Here, found their landing page - http://graffiticms.com/landing-pages/the-wordpress-as-a-content-management-system-cms-alternative/

They should have come out with a better name; I know names are not that important, but by just reading "graffiti", I form a biased opinion...

It looks nice though.

In the .NET/IIS world:

Subtext (http://www.subtextproject.com/)
dasBlog (http://www.dasblog.info/)
BlogEngine.NET (http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/)
VineType (http://vinetype.com/)

MovableType!

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned ModX.  Seems like this is the rising star among open source cms's.  Focuses on doing things simply but also on being flexible and easily extensible.  Not sure how it fares regarding security, but given overall qualify of vision and design I expect they're doing pretty well with that too:  http://www.modxcms.com/

> You could have it hosted on wordpress.com if you wanted to stick with wordpress. 

Arghh.  If you host with wordpress, I believe you can't put ads or affiliate links on it. You may not want to now, but you might feel differently one day especially if your blog starts getting thousands of uniques per day. You're also at the mercy of their ToS and whatever changes they may make in future.   

Also, moving from a wordpress subdomain will also prove a problem if you decide to move - all the links to your site that you carefully built up are now broken. Whatever software you choose, get your own domain and put the site there.

"I'm surprised nobody's mentioned ModX."

Don't be.

I am the one surprised that they even manage to get an award. I used Modxcms in late 2005 and 2006, it was just at its beginning. I did not like it. Modxcms was advertised as an AJAX-featured CMS, the community unhelpful and told you to RTFM, or go learn PHP. Now, in 2008, they still have the same web template as in 2005, the same programmer-centered concept, I hope they don't have the same community.

I'm not surprised of the rise of other blogging CMSes like Wordpress, Movable Type, Expression Engine. Content management must not be a programmer's job; the average user should be able to work with CMSes without a programmer's help.

Wait a little for Wordpress 2.3 releases to settles in security means. And also security upgrades are not that hard. 

Wordpress has a very active community, and you'll be very comfortable with tons of themes and plugins. I've been using it for the whole web site. It's so easy to manage..

hint: I've seen xmlrpc.php is the source of many bugs. So just removing this file may help. (Last security issues is also related with this file.)

I would strongly suggest not hosting a blog at wordpress if you are a uISV.

I'm not personally motivated by the ability to include affiliate links or not.  After all, a link to your own site is the best affiliate link you possibly have, right?  You know the vendor won't cheat you, and the payout is 100%!

However, hosted wordpress:

* Can't use more than a handful of themes
* Is difficult to make look non-generic as a result
* Can't use plugins, some of which are shockingly useful (anyone here run self-hosted Wordpress?  What Would Seth Godin Do.  Install this TODAY.)
* Contributes much less to SEO than the same blog being at www.myuisv.com/blog would do
* Has anemic built-in stats, and can't use e.g. Google Analytics
* Will, if your blog gets popular, show your competitor's ads on it
* Will, if your blog gets popular, show your own ads on it so you can pay for the privilege of getting clicks from customers who were already drawn to your website

I love the Wordpress software and I'm not unhappy that I started blogging with them, but if I had a time travel machine and could change ONE thing about my uISV, this would be it.

Wow! Patrick thanks for sharing.

OP, you can also consider TextPattern; I have finished the first book published for the CMS; the book is not great, but I think the CMS is worth trying.

I am currently using WordPress for my personal blog ( http://blog.vermorel.com, self-hosted), but for my uISV blog I decided to go for www.squarespace.com (see http//blog.lokad.com ).

Reasons where
- I wanted a fully managed application (can't waste my time with security patch)
- I wanted a fully skinable application.
- I wanted a zero-downtime hosting (squarespace is over 99.9 updtime over 1 year according to my stats)

Hope it helps,
Joannès

Hi,

There is Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin that automatically downloads latest available version and patches your blog:

http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade-plugin.html

I've just upgrade my personal blog. It took 2.5 minutes. This is the second time I've used it and I had no problems. You should check if it runs properly on your server - it needs internet access, write permissions etc. Worth a try IMO.

You want a "simple, secure and self hosted" tool?

This might be biased because this is the only CMS that I've extensively used so far but I did look at the popular WordPress before I found out about this one - didn't like WordPress one bit and luckily someone told be about this one, a really simple, and a very extensible CMS tool.

It's called sNews (snewscms.com).

The fact that it only consists of only one small core file made me even learn a bit of PHP and MySQL for which I was completely ignorant before. Probably what I like most about it is that even as a newbie in the field, I could quickly get it to do what I wanted.

BTW, about the sNews community - a bunch of the most helpful people I've seen, but I'll admit - I haven't had time in months now to be a part of it and it has grown quite a bit from the last time I've been there...

Didn't think I'd have to mention, but judging by some of the comments, I'd have to add that it's open source and also free as in beer.

> I'm not personally motivated by the ability to include affiliate links or not.  After all, a link to your own site is the best affiliate link you possibly have, right?  You know the vendor won't cheat you, and the payout is 100%!

You're kind of missing the point there Patrick.

Unless the only things that you're ever going to write about is your own product  - and your own product completely and finally caters to every single visitor's potential needs, you're missing easy incremental revenue.

For example, all those, or at least some of those mentions on your blog of Adwords, PayPal, payment processors, SEO tools, domain registrars, hosting, etc., could be earning you extra money in addition to whatever you get from selling your particular niche software product. Since you've written the content anyway, why wouldn't you want to get paid for it?

Sitefinity is a very nice asp.net CMS that includes blogging:

http://www.sitefinity.com

Why not use wordpress?
It is constantly update so it is more secure

+1 for self-hosting WP.

And upgrading is pretty easy.  You can easily write your own script (or have someone write one) to do the upgrade for you.  I have a friend who manages about 150 WP blogs.  He wrote some scripts to do the updates for him.  He averages 1 issue every 2-3 upgrades.  And that usually stems from someone hacking the PHP for new features/tweaks instead of using the add-in and theme support.

+1 for Textpattern (TXP).  I haven't used it in awhile though, so I don't know how active it is.  But I used it extensively about a year ago.  Very customizable.

Sunil -- I was going to reply here, but it got a little long.

http://microisvjournal.wordpress.com/2008/02/11/why-i-dont-monetize-this-blog/

It's your blog, do what you want Patrick.

I read the first half of your article (sorry I'm lazy, will try to read it all later). I think you've fallen into the same trap as a lot of other programmers. You've convinced yourself selling=shilling=scamming, and that's holding you back.

In your article, you talk about how using affiliate links would require you to change your content, trick your readers, and setup your site so that the only reason to visit it is to make you money (which is of course no reason at all). Changing a direct link to GoDaddy to an affiliate link, doesn't require any of those things.

Of course I don't know how many visitors you get to your blog, so maybe it's not worth monetizing anyway.

I'm enjoying Drupal immensely.  Very flexible package that makes a pretty nice blog right out the gate.