A “state of the art blogging solution” is how LifeType describes themselves. For me, they were filed in the drawer labeled “blogging engines I had never heard of”. It does a good job at covering all the blogging basics.
They have ping and trackback, RSS, blogroll, permalinks, and come reading for moblogging too.
How easy is it to install? The installation process looks pretty straight forward. Should be good to go on any Linux-based hosting setup with MySQL database support.
LifeType also has a very interesting history, as described by their about page:
The LifeType project started in February 2003 when its leader, Oscar Renalias, needed a set of dynamic scripts for his personal web page. Even though he did not know about the idea of weblogs back then, the outcome of the first iteration of the project already resembled one. A few weeks later Francesc, another one of the founding members, suggested that developing a blog with support for multiple users and blogs could be a better idea, and so pLog 0.1 was released on the 2nd of September 2003 featuring most of the features that are still part of the core features nowadays: multi-user and multi-blog from the ground up, template engine, localizable and extensible via plugins.
It seems it was also known as pLog for some time, but they had to drop the name due to trademark concern with Amazon.
Here are a few more links you may wish to have handy:
- LifeType Templates and Styles - The styles for LifeType are fully customizable, so you can fix it up to suit any design need you might have.
- LifeType Plugins - As with other blogging scripts (like WordPress) LifeType comes with the ability to add a number of different plugins too.
If you want to give it a whirl before you install, you can try out the admin and user interface demo over at OpenSourceCMS.
LifeType’s biggest feature is that they support multiple blogs and users in a single installation. You can download LifeType via their web site, and if you have had any experience with it, I would love to hear your feedback. Is it really the state of the art blogging solution it claims to be?
