Giving blogs with pLog / lifetype
Update: due to a trademark dispute with Amazon, pLog is now ‘LifeType’ and lives here instead (better name anyway I reckon!), This is part of a larger, ongoing series which examines how – in 2005 / 2006 – you can give people blogs. Visit the contents page to see the lot (or suggest more content!) or grab the feed to keep up with new stuff! pLog seems to be somewhat the forgotten gem of open source blogging solutions and well worth checking out for anyone examining this area. 
Not that I’m the first to kinda like what’s offered here, for example from Lockergnome
:
“Why pay at all when you can get everything that MovableType offers free of charge from pLog? Both applications have virtually the same basic features and personally, I think pLog is a lot easier to customize. pLog is ideal for anyone wanting to easily host a blogging community (with its summary.php page), and has added functionality for extras like podcasting built into the core.”
And that sums it up pretty well, it’s a straightforward, simple and effective system that certainly impresses. However, straightforward and simple really does mean that… and while for some people this might be a huge benefit, the comparatively small amount of development and community based around the tool means that there is by no means a plethora of plugins (read that as ‘no plugins’). You won’t be getting your hands on a WSYWIG editor of any description and while it has plenty of excellent templates I’m not sure if they’re particularly flexible in terms of providing multiple forms of representation through for different pages. Nonetheless it is being used very successfully by a number of organisations including Blogs @ Rice and the extremely successful (and place where I tested it out at 
) Bloc de BalearWeb. Given this, the stable 1.01 release, and the ease of installation of the software for multiple blog use this is definitely one to have a run with at no cost to yourselves!
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We somehow managed to miss this article, but just a few words to say that we *do* have a few plugins. Actually, as many as 50 ranging from supporting Nokia’s Lifeblog moblogging tool via Atom to generating sitemap.xml files Google, on-line template editors and even integration with Flickr. It’s not probably as many as WP, but enough to choose from
We also provide a WYSIWYG editor with plog, HTMLArea even though we will be switching to TinyMCE in our next version. The editor can be turned on and off at will via the blog settings panel.
In any case, thanks for taking a quick look at pLog!
Thanks for that oscar, will take into account!