Blog Plugins

[alienee2]

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There seems to be nice ones that are no longer active for 3.1.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

There 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
  
  
• quick posting, easy post creation
  
  
• categories and or tagging of posts
  
  
• seperate UI and datastore as to not clutter pages with news posts
  
  
• selectors for posts by date, category, tag
  
  
• sort options
  

These can be handled by plugins themselves or other plugins
search compatability
external commenting support
multi user support, front user or multi user plugins for example
The ability to flag a page as news also is a neat feature
rss feeds


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 ?

Hi Shawn,

I think the near perfect blog is done with Special Pages;
all of the things you list are easy to do with that plugin, except i haven't come up with a good way to do categories yet, but i have some ideas;
also i haven't yet solved how to handle archive and most popular;

-marc