Today I found an interesting alternative to WordPress, Roller.

It is not as advanced as WordPress, and sure doesn’t have as many extensions. But the basic functionalities of a blog are implemented:

  1. Maintain a weblog, with user-defined categories.
  2. Publish your weblog as an RSS news feed.
  3. Maintain a collection of favorite bookmarks, organized by bookmark folders. This is something I do on a static web page on WordPress today.
  4. Maintain a collection of favorite RSS news feeds. Can surely be done in WordPress too, but what I partically like with this blog solution is that has an inbuilt planet/aggregator solution. You can read all your friends blogs from within your own blog! Now how cool is that?

On the other hand, WordPress 2.1 is released, with more bug fixes and even new functionality. Among them Akismet plugin for handling spam. I guess I will try this version out before really considering Roller.

A few word for one of the developers:

What’s really exciting for me is what’s coming in the future. First of all, the 2.0 series was an unparalleled success, with over 1.8 million downloads, and thanks to the work of Mark Jaquith we’re committing to maintaining stable security and bug fixes on the 2.0 branch until 2010.

More exciting for most of our users, though, is our new development cycle. Based on everything we’ve learned in the past 3 years of doing WordPress, we’ve decided to shift to a more frequent release schedule like Ubuntu, with major releases coming several times a year. So, for the first time in WordPress’ history, I have an answer to when the next version is coming out: April 23rd.

Oh goody, goody…

Update 23.01.07: Updated my blog to WordPress 2.1, and I have started looking in to some of the new features. I especially like that it is easier to switch between visual and code editing.

There are not many themes available for WordPress 2.1 yet, so I will for now be sticking with the default one.