Free Miniblog Scipts?

January 29, 2010 7:50 PM

Designing a website for a client, they want a little mini blog on the sidebar of the home page. What free PHP blogging software do you recommend?

Howdy,

Basically they just want the ability to post news, pictures and the like along right half of the homepage and give the general public the ability to comment on their posts and generally give their customers a chance to interact with them.

I know there are a ton of PHP blog scripts out there, but I'm looking specifically for something that could be easily integrated into an existing page (about 500px wide worth of real estate), with little to no extras cluttering up the area. Most of the scripts I've seen are intended for a full dedicated page and don't seem easily customizable to remove all the clutter and extras and slip into this smallish area.

Any suggestions?

posted by Jezztek to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Well, we're dedicated WordPress junkies at my house, so we do this with WordPress. Essentially, we use WordPress to post the news and then take the blog's RSS feed and put that on the home page. You can completely control the width, CSS and every other element of the output with this method.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:13 PM on January 29, 2010

Response by poster: Interesting, I hadn't thought of just formatting the RSS feed when doing this.
posted by Jezztek at 8:27 PM on January 29, 2010

2nding WordPress. You could go with an RSS widget on the sidebar like DarlingBri said, but I think that option wouldn't provide a comments tally (ex. "34 Comments"). Clicking on the RSS link would show the single post on a page which would show comments, though.

To get a fully workable miniature blog with WP, set a WP page as the homepage for the site and then add the WP Loop to the single page template (as a sidebar). The templating system has a bit of a learning curve, but I think it's worth it to have a great authoring interface and solid back-end.
posted by cowbellemoo at 3:41 AM on January 30, 2010

3rding WP, but in my experience the RSS option also is going to strip out most html, including links, for security reasons. You'll get a lot more flexibiilty incorporating the loop in your sidebar, including not just comment tallies but also the ability to specify the truncate point per post, the little linky widget you use for "more inside," and some other stuff.

Here's a link that tells how to do this.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 6:41 AM on January 30, 2010