note: this is not going to be a thorough comparision. it's just an initial thought since i haven't really tested the feature in wp.

a bit of history

a few years ago (around 2006 or 2007) i decided to self-host my blogs and was looking for a software. wordpress seemed to be the obvious choice because it was popular. i was able to kickstart my site with the famous 5-minute installation.

i was a bit ambitious back then and wanted to 'do it big' with my blog. i wanted to have different blogs for different purposes and to separate my contents. but different wp installation is required for each blog. i can't remember why i didn't use wordpress mu. either it wasn't available or i couldn't make it to work.

i started googling around and found b2evolution. i downloaded, installed, tested and was quite impressed. a new blog can be created on the fly. this blog has been powered by b2evo since then. and somehow i became lazy and didn't use the multiple blogs feature of the software.

fyi, b2evo shared the same ancestor as wordpress. it's just wordpress became the 'official' branch. story here.

since wordpress is so popular, i decided to give it a go several times. due to no practical usage i ended up not using it.

multiple blogs setup

this is my nth attempt to test wordpress. since V3 wordpress mu has merged into the main branch, i want to see how wp handles multiple sites. it's not built in by default and needed to add a line of code to config file. that's easy. but my next attempt to see how it works failed. i get this error:

Error: You cannot install a network of sites with your server address.

due to my test environment and limitations, i have to run tests on ports other and 80 and 443. this breaks one of the requirements.

just by reading the doc creating a network in wp, it seems more complicated to setup than b2evo. there are too many requirements and restrictions to make it work.

b2evolution's way of handling multiple blogs / sites is cleaner and easier. it can be easily added and configured in the backoffice.

other multiple blogs softwares

there's another software branched out from b2evo called quam plures, started by a group of users who aren't happy with the direction b2evo was going. it is still in beta. when i tested it a few months ago, it still looked and felt very much like b2evo. one thing i like about it is, it reverts some of the functions back - you don't need to save a post before adding images to your post.

update: comments below brought my attention to another multiblog software called life type. i have yet tried it out.

if you know any other multiblogs softwares, please leave comments below.