1. WordPress – WordPress is blogging platform  which is free and focuses on usability and web standards. Word press is best choice because it provides lots of free plugins and easy to install and use. It is supported by great developer community. Also it is used by PlayStation, Smashing Magazine, GigaOM, Pac-Man and many more. Lots of themes are available and supported with WordPress. You can install them just by a click. Creating and Publishing Post is very easy.

Some of the main features are listed below:

–Compliant to Web Standards: WordPress code is fully compliant with standards of W3C. This will help in achieving forward compatibility for future tools and provides interoperability for all different types of browser available today.

–Support for Multiple Authors: It allows to create different levels of users allowing them to have different privileges to access, publish or edit the post.

–Comments: It allows the readers to leave comments on your post. Comments can be enabled or disabled per post basis.

–Themes: Lots of Free themes are available to choose from.

–User Registration Feature: It allows to users register and create their profiles. They can comment on your post.

–Support for Google analytics, Google Adsense etc.

These are few basic features listed which every blogger would need when he starts blogging. Lot more is supported with WordPress.

 

2. Nucleus CMS: It is open source Blog Management Software. It helps to publish a website and supports writers to write articles. It can be considered as lightweight Content Management System. Nucleus Core package has a following set of features:

  • Allows you to maintain one or more weblogs or news-sites
  • Allows Multiple Authors
  • Supports Fancy URLs
  • Create different Categories
  • Provides Built-in commenting system
  • Deploy it on your own server
  • Create and Save Drafts and Future Posts
  • Lots of Plugins available
  • Bookmarklet
  • Archives and Search feature
  • RSS and Atom Syndication
  • Supports media File/Image Upload
  • Allows Backup and Restore feature.

 

3. Open Blog: It is open source and free blogging software. Blogging is simple using the powerful and easy to use user interface. Features of Open Blog software are:

  • Powerful user friendly interface
  • It is very easy to install
  • Provides Multi language support
  • Great number of different templates are supported
  • It is Open Source code
  • You can create Search engine friendly URLs for your post
  • Allows to create static pages
  • Embed Links in the post
  • Supports Feed
  • Easy to use administrator panel
  • WYSIWYG editor
  • Lots of free Plug-ins available.

 

4. Nibbleblog: It is easy, fast and free CMS blog. It is very simple to install, configure and powerful engine to create and publish blogs. The database of nibbleblog is base don XML files so no need to have MySQL or any other DBMS. Main features:

  • Provides WYSIWYG editor
  • Supports upload of media files and pictures
  • Plugins available.

 

5. Chyrp: Chyrp is a blogging engine designed to be very lightweight while retaining functionality. It is powered by PHP and has very powerful theme and extension engines, so you can personalize it however you want. The code is well-documented, and it has a very strong structure that’s loosely based on the MVC design pattern. There are many things special about Chyrp, but the best way to describe it is to just have you try it yourself. Few features listed:

  • Extremely lightweight
  • Provides preview mode
  • Allows to customize URLs
  • Very easy to add and edit pages
  • Allows to save posts as drafts to edit and publish at later time
  • Supports HTML blog posting
  • Lots of modules to add functionality to your blog
  • Clean interface with AJAX
  • Add comment feather to add a comment system to blog.

 

 

6. Lifetype: LifeType is an open-source blogging platform with support for multiple blogs and users in a single installation. It provides WYSIWYG editor to writing articles. Feature list includes:

  • Very user friendly interface
  • Support for Media Management
  • Different options to choose your Style
  • Supports Built-in anti-spam Filter
  • Support for Trackbacks
  • Multiple Users allowed per Blog
  • Very easy to install and configure
  • Mobile related features supported
  • Multiple Blogs in one Installation
  • Central Page for Communities
  • Multiple Subdomains allowed
  • Easily Localizable
  • Performance
  • Nice Looking URLs
  • Nice and Clean Code
  • Clean Content
  • Powerful Plugin Framework
  • Smarty Templates
  • XMLRPC.

 

Note: I have not tried all the blog platforms (other than WordPress) mentioned in this articles. You can browse through their respective sites to get more insight and then try your hands.