Top 10 Free And Open Source Blogging Platforms For Developers

The major blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr – these are not designed for hackers. Out of the box these popular blogging platforms lack in a lot of things like code syntax highlighting, markup language support besides HTML and so on. If you are looking for a blogging platform which is programmer-friendly then here we will provide you a list of 10 free and open source blogging platforms which are designed keeping developers' requirements in mind.

1. Hexo: 

Hexo is a blogging platform which is powered by Node.js. Its has hacker-friendly features like native support for GitHub Flavored Markdown (GMF) and you can also template and extend capabilities using EJS, Swig and Stylus. Hexo can be installed within a few seconds through $ npm install hexo -g.



2. Jekyll: 

Jekyll is a static site generator which compiles your markup files into Web-ready HTML documents. Jekyll has a steady-growing ecosystem, as there are several open source projects being developed for it like Octopress, JekyllBootstrap and Exitwp. Jekyll can be installed as a Ruby Gem through gem install jekyll.



3. Anchor CMS: 

Anchor CMS is a lightweight platform as its source code .zip archive is just a little over 200 KB. Anchor supports Markdown syntax, which seems to be easier for coders as it's quite natural for blog-writing and formatting. It also supports art-directed blogging.



4. Wheat: 

Wheat is a cool platform as it pulls articles from GitHub and then publishes it to the website. Wheat is developed with Node.js and can be installed as a Node packaged module: npm install wheat.

5. Nikola: 

Nikola is a static site generator which is strongly blog-oriented but it can also be used for any other type of website. It has a small codebase, which means "programmers can understand all of Nikola core in a day." Nikola supports an array of markup languages like reStructuredText, Markdown and of course HTML will do fine with it.



6. toto: 

toto is "the 10 second blog-engine for hackers” and it is a minimalist blogging engine which runs on Git. It means you can version-control your posts too.

7. Poet: 

Poet is a Node.js-powered blogging platform which gives you the ability to write your blog posts using a markup language, as per you wish. It can be Markdown, Jade or whatever you want. You can also customize routes for your blog posts.



8. Dropplets: 

Dropplets is a Markdown blogging platform which has a limited feature set. It helps you to spend more time in writing and less time in improvising matters.

9. Pelican: 

Pelican, a static site generator, is written in Python. It supports reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc markup. It also features code syntax highlighting out of the box and an importing feature for data coming from other publishing platforms such WordPress. Theming can be done using Jinja2.



10. Bolt: 

Bolt is a content management system which can be used for other purposes outside blogging. It uses Twig for templating and its own Symphony debug bar is used for tracing code issues. You can choose from SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL.