It’s true that there are tons of blogging software solutions from which to choose. Each has their place, and their legion of ardent followers.

Habari is being written with a firm understanding of the current state of blogging. Most other blogging packages have been around long enough that their responses to things like comment spam and Digg site overloads are bolted on after the fact; whereas Habari is being written from the beginning to take these things — and more — into account.

Habari strongly favors open, standard, and documented protocols. Atom, being both open and documented, is the prefered syndication format, and the Atom Publishing Protocol is the prefered means of remote communication with your site. This is a core feature, and not a plugin.

Habari is being written specifically for modern web hosting environments, and uses modern object-oriented programming techniques. Using these recent but well-established additions to the PHP language allows Habari to make use of PDO, enabling prepared statements for all interactions with the database. This greatly reduces the system’s vulnerability to SQL injection attacks. This is just one of many benefits of modern object-oriented techniques.

Those are just a few of the technical differences, but a major component of what makes Habari different is its community participation model. Users who demonstrate a consistent level of quality contributions to the project are granted more privileges within the project.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://habariproject.org

Markup Factory is a web publishing platform that helps you create great websites and keep them fresh and useful and alive. Plus, you can easily start an email newsletter, publish a calendar or blog, or take online registrations for your events. The Markup Factory Template Engine can support native XHTML / CSS code. Simply copy and paste, or use the Markup Factory scripting engine to add life to your template.

The other unique component to Markup Factory is that it provides a powerful set of web applications ready to deploy with minimal effort. If you want to deploy dynamic of data driven functionality on your website, most of the heavy lifting is already done for you so that you can focus on the implementation. Optional add-ons include some very powerful utilities that convert your website into a powerful communications tool. Learn more about the Events Engine, Online Store, Newsletters, Membership Module, and Online Database.

The only disadvantage is that Markup Factory is not free. However, all plans are pay as you go. There are no long-term contracts, no setup fees, no termination fee, and you may cancel at any time.

Pricing: Fully Loaded ($149/mo), Pro ($49/mo), Basic ($14.95/mo)
Source: http://www.markupfactory.com

dotCMS Core is the most feature complete open source web CMS available today. Available under the GPL, you can freely download the dotCMS system and get up, running and managing web sites and web content in a matter of minutes. Unlike many other “open source” cms, dotCMS is in no way crippled. When you download the dotCMS system, you are getting all of the functions and features needed to begin creating customized, manageable and scalable web sites. This includes so called “advanced” features such as LDAP/AD integration, clustering support, online templating, Web2.0 Calendaring and the structured content engine.

If you are looking to get a head start in getting your new web sites off the ground, they offer accelerators – starter sites – that combine the power and flexibility of the dotCMS system with cutting edge information architecture, compliant HTML and pre-build functions. These accelerators are designed to be easy to customize and brand with unique graphical design.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.dotcms.org/

Squarespace is an exceptionally tuned publishing system for managing websites and blogs. Need to create a blog? Build a website? Our software helps discerning individuals build stylish, easy to manage websites complete with state-of-the-art blogging tools. Squarespace hosts thousands of high-quality websites — both large and small.

The Squarespace Journal, which can represent either a piece of your website, or the entirety of your site, is an ideal way to create a professional blog. Squarespace’s professional-grade blogging tools feature spell checking, ATOM, RSS, feed auto-discovery, XML-RPC pinging, comment management, member registration, timed publishing dates, multiple authors, and more.

Squarespace comes pre-loaded with a variety of professionally designed, search-engine friendly templates that you can customize and tweak to create a unique site. With Squarespace’s style editor, you can use one of our professional starting points to begin a design of your own.

Pricing: $7/month – $175/month
Source: http://squarespace.com/

ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich content management system that empowers thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies around the world to easily manage their website. If you’re tired of the limitations of your current CMS then take ExpressionEngine for a spin.

Unlike most other publishing systems, ExpressionEngine doesn’t force you to work a certain way. It adapts to your creative process. Examine our portfolio of featured sites and you’ll find that each one uniquely fulfills the creative and artistic vision of its designer. No cookie-cutter sites here.

ExpressionEngine is modular by design, enabling you to easily add new features and capability with add-on modules, plugins, and extensions. Included by default are 17 add-on modules, access to over 100 plugins, and dozens of extension hooks.

Pricing: Core (Free), Personal ($99.95), Commercial ($249.95)
Source: http://expressionengine.com/

Symphony is a web publishing system made for web developers. It gives you all the power and flexibility you’ll need, while keeping out of your way.

Symphony lets you organise everything the way you like, from your publishing environment to your website’s URL structure. Built to be versatile and customisable, Symphony really is what you make of it.

Symphony’s templating engine is pure XSLT goodness. XSLT is a standard recommended by the W3C, so learning Symphony means that you’re learning skills that you can also use outside of the system. If you already know the XML and CSS standards, then chances are you should be able to quickly pick up XSLT.

Symphony lets you to create small blocks of XSLT code called utilities, which you can use as building blocks to construct your site’s pages. Due to the nature of XSLT, these utilities are highly reusable, so the next time you’re developing a website you’ll probably find you’ve already done half the work.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://21degrees.com.au/products/symphony/

Ellington is an online publishing system designed from the ground up for media sites. Featuring rich metadata, clean separation of content and presentation and an elegant web-based interface, Ellington makes it easier than ever for you to create, organize and publish your content online.

Ellington handles all kinds of content — including stories, blogs, user comments, polls, entertainment listings, photos, audio, video, static HTML pages, and much more. Each type of content has its own unique metadata and can be assigned meaningful and relevant relationships with other types of content.

And because Ellington’s state-of-the-art template system is a clean bridge between data and presentation, multiple sites can share content but still look vastly different.

From small newspapers and niche publications to widespread publication networks, Ellington’s streamlined content-management tools and powerful development platform give you everything you need to make your content come alive on the Web.

Pricing: Contact for details
Source: http://www.ellingtoncms.com/

OpenCms from Alkacon Software is a professional, easy to use website content management system. OpenCms helps content managers worldwide to create and maintain beautiful websites fast and efficiently.

The fully browser based user interface features configurable editors for structured content with well defined fields. Alternatively, content can be created using an integrated WYSIWYG editor similar to well known office applications. A sophisticated template engine enforces a site-wide corporate layout and W3C standard compliance for all content.

OpenCms is based on Java and XML technology. It can be deployed in an open source environment (e.g. Linux, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL) as well as on commercial components (e.g. Windows NT, IIS, BEA Weblogic, Oracle). As true open source software, OpenCms is free of licensing costs.

sNews is a completely free, standards compliant, PHP and MySQL driven content management system. Consisting of only one small core file, sNews is extremely lightweight, easy to install, and easy to use via a simple web interface.

With sNews you can create a website that consists of dynamic pages and have a blog at the same time. sNews has a front page option and categories for you to categorize your articles. Corporate CMS or a personal blog – your choice.

sNews uses search engine friendly URLs throughout, to make your website truly loved by Google and other search engines (as well as your visitors). This makes a sNews driven site highly Search Engine Optimized from the get-go and will greatly assist in your site obtaining a good SEO ranking.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://snewscms.com/

SilverStripe is a Content Management the way it was meant to be. It is powerful enough for any website or intranet design and simple enough for anyone to use with the following main features.

• Simple. Intuitive and user-friendly
• Flexible coding framework (MVC)
• Scalable. From 1 page to a million
• Fast. As responsive as a desktop app thanks to native Ajax support
• Standards Compliant. Fully XHTML compliant
• Modular. Easy to extend
• Template Freedom. No restrictions on the look and feel of your site
• Open source. It’s free (BSD) and you can contribute to the project.
• Cross platform (Windows/Linux/Mac) and easy to install (PHP based)

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.silverstripe.com/