Entrepreneurs take note. This is a problem that is not being solved. There are lots of smallish bloggers out there who want more customization than Blogger/Wordpress.com/Tumblr/Posterous allow, whose best option is Wordpress and shared hosting. This is a sucky best option. Do something about this; make some money solving this problem.
This is a Turing Tarpit; the only infinitely customizable blog platform is "PHP" (or your choice of other actual language). And as your customization possibility space increases, the customization inevitably starts to look like a language. Because it is.
That's why nobody's "solved" this problem in the last ten years; you can't have programming language flexibility without programming language complexity.
Wordpress is like Apache or Sendmail. A 500-headed monster. It's simple enough to use and does everything. It's also sloppy and overgrown. Most people don't need all the extra stuff it does. Certainly not at the expense of security.
Apache => Nginx
Sendmail => Postfix
Wordpress => _______
That is room for an enterprising open source developer.
"It's also sloppy and overgrown. Most people don't need all the extra stuff it does. Certainly not at the expense of security."
The problem is that everyone needs a different 20% customized. This is what Joel Spolsky basically argues in Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth: http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html . He's talking about desktop software, but you can see the same essential thing in blogging software; I'm using Wordpress for Grant Writing Confidential at http://blog.seliger.com chiefly because it has everything I want and is easy to use.
The extra stuff I use includes themes and a couple of plugins, like one for generating an XML sitemap and another for cacheing. I know that blogging platform X probably has the particular set of features I need -- until I find something that it can't do.
I don't trust Sendmail but there's an emotional component to that; I would have laughed at you for using it in 1999, but I think 2 decades of analysis has to produce some result.
There's something more going on with Wordpress than simple complexity.
It's had its fair share of problems. Mostly in the past at this point though. It is heavily bloated and overgrown compared with something lean and mean like nginx.
Even if Wordpress didn't have security issues there'd be room for an nginx of blogging.
Understood, but I don't think people need infinite customizability. They need roughly Wordpress-level customizability, security, and relatively cheap hosting. Can no one really supply this?
"Understood, but I don't think people need infinite customizability."
Need, no. Want? Yes. Literally "infinite"? No. But variable beyond belief? Yes.
Elsewhere in the thread, you complain about hardcoded URL structures! That's pretty far out there on the "I demand customizability!" front, if you consider the horrible things that will do to your platform's internals. Random users running code in their templates, another feature you request, implies that we need to sandbox and resource limit the templates, if we also want to maintain the ability to have "cheap" hosting (which breaks if our users start writing infinite loops into their templates). (Sorry, did I say "if"? I meant "when".) Take your needs, and two other customers with the same level of detailed desires, but different desires, take the union of them, and you've got a freaking complicated product spec'ed out. One that, incidentally, is going to be pretty complicated to actually customize. Oh, and the odds of it suffering the classic "endless interacting-feature bugs because nobody ever said no to a feature" is basically 100%.
Weebly is solving this problem -- you just may not have noticed.
We have rich blogging features that are on par or better than most blog systems: create posts, edit your side bar, set catgories, human-readable (and adjustable) URLs, commenting, comment moderation (open/moderate/closed), close commenting after x days, post in the past, set time zones, post drafts, private drafts, etc.
Even better, a blog doesn't have to be the focus of your site -- it can be just a page. You can create other pages to put things like pictures, videos, photo galleries, slide shows, maps -- by just dragging and dropping them on. You can even create custom forms and surveys by dragging on the form elements (name, address, phone number, drop downs, etc)
While you can't upload PHP, you do have full customizability over your theme CSS and HTML.
To top it off, your site is hosted free of charge on our robust infrastructure that's machine and geographically redundant. We serve sites that hit the front page of Digg or the NYT every day and don't even see a blip in our traffic graphs :)
That sounds awesome, but I have too questions about your service that the homepage did not answer (atleast I could not find it straight away):
Is there an export option? I would have to be locked into using your guys just to see your company fail (and you don't seem to have a way to do revenue, esp. when you won't put ads on the blogs)?
Is there a way for me to host blog._somedomain_ with you, I would rather not make my blog the focus of the domain...
First, our company won't be going under any time soon -- while 95% of the features are free, there are an extra 5% available to power users as part of our "pro" package for ~$4/month. We also sell domains. We're strongly profitable, so you don't have to worry about us going under :)
But should you choose, you can export your site as a .zip file and host it somewhere else.
Also, you can choose from either a .weebly.com subdomain or point either your domain.com or blog.domain.com to us -- in either case, we'll still host your site free of charge.
Well, at the risk of derailing the conversation... I've extensively customized tumblr. I have beefs about some other elements of their service, but what sort of customization are you talking about that's not possible with tumblr?
Honest question, can you upload a script file (PHP/Perl/Python/ASP/Whatever) to tumblr and integrate it with other parts?
When I was freelancing I used to get a lot of requests like this: I want blog/comments/sharing, image gallery, video, and --insert business specific thing here--.
And Wordpress and its plugins make this easy(ier).
No server-side code allowed, but you can work all the jquery magic you want and they have a facility for static pages with arbitrary URLs. I'd probably not recommend selling it to a business, because, for example, here's how I'd do an image gallery:
1) upload the pics to flickr
2) use jquery to grab the pics
3) make a static page to display them
Also, because it's clear that their service is designed for single-person blogs, their group blogs have some annoyances that range from minor to severe.
As I understand it, with Tumblr you can't customize your URL structure, you need to use external commenting systems, and your themes can't run non-js code. Also, many people use Wordpress as a hybrid CMS/blog; the ability to have pages (again with a defined url structure) is important.
Tumblr has a great bookmarklet, a good iphone app, a good community, reasonable uptime, and a good admin and customization interface. I don't recommend their group blogs, though I have several, but I highly recommend their service for one person.
llimllib, thanks for the reply. I can think of a number of reasons that you might want to have dynamic elements in your theme. I understand the concern over themes running code, but if you want things like breadcrumbs and your CMS doesn't come with them as a native function then you need to be able to run native code. Ideally, the CMS would include a wide and extensible array of native functions that themes could take advantage of, but tumblr certainly isn't that CMS.
Good to know about the pages.
One other issue is file uploads. Say I want to host my CV at domain.com/CV.pdf. I don't think I could do that with Tumblr. Is that too much to ask?
