Blog Plugins

[shawn_a]

Whats the best plugin for blogs and news posting ?

I've been evaluating them all, and I cant find one that meets blog requirements.

There seems to be nice ones that are no longer active for 3.1.

Then there is a new breed of "blog/news" hackery, using normal pages.
Which seems like the safest bet right now as far as continued support.
But I find creating pages for news to be a clumsy, bulky, slow experience

These are the requirements for a blog plugin. At least mine.

• excerpt templating, built in or custom, for listing or blog rolls.
  
• excerpt support for breaks and preview thumbs (preset thumb crops in config)
  
  
• quick posting, easy post creation, more streamlined than page creation.
  
  
• categories and/or tagging of posts
  
  
• seperate UI and datastore as to not clutter pages with news posts, or same datastore but can hide from pages view.
  
  
• selectors for posts by date, category, tag
  
  
• sort options
  

These can be handled by plugins themselves or other plugins
But are also essential important features

• search compatability
  
  
• external commenting support
  
  
• multi user support, front user or multi user plugins for example
  
• The ability to flag a normal page as news also would be a neat feature
  
• rss news feeds
  
• rss auto syndicated feeds
  
• archives, month, year selectors.
  
• Inline image uploading
  
• Post statistics, eg. Most popular, talkbacks etc.
  

So I wonder are there any existing blog frameworks that can be converted into plugins ?

Or how can we create the perfect blog plugin ?
It seems like a badass blog plugin would be something that might simply join the awesome plugins we have.
i18n search, simple pages, page excerpts, dynpages

Thoughts ?

EDITED:
I've added some features mentioned so far and clarified some of the bullet points for now.
Thanks for moving it to dev discussions, it has turned into that more than a specific blog solution discussion.