Dotclear as Alternative to WordPress

While searching for a good, new platform for this blog, the first blog software you came across obviously is WordPress. But as I was not so happy with the multi-language features of WordPress (see this other post), I searched for a better solution.

Then I found Dotclear that looked at first sight like a interesting alternative:

  • It looks clean and easy.
  • It’s written in PHP (as I’m developing in PHP myself, too, that’s important for me in case it should be necessary to add or change something myself).
  • It should be easily possible to use more than one language for the blog (that’s the reason why I’m unhappy with WordPress).

Therefore I just gave it a try and installed it on my test server which worked without problems and errors.

Directly after the first login I wanted to have a look inside the documentation and the plug-in descriptions to see what plug-ins are available for this system. But then I was appalled: all plug-in descriptions and part of the documentation seem to be only available in French!

Maybe I could still understand it by using my school’s Latin knowledge and Google Translate, but I really don’t want to use a blogging system that’s main language is not English.

Although I’m a German native speaker, I even don’t think any bigger open source project should choose German as main language: if there are translations in other languages that’s great, of course, but as most of all people understand English, the main language of all projects should be English! Period.

Therefore I stopped testing Dotclear and stayed with WordPress.

Did you also have positive or negative experience with Dotclear yourself already?

This post is also available in Deutsch.

4 thoughts on “Dotclear as Alternative to WordPress

  1. Apart from that both systems are based on PHP as programming language, there are very different. Therefore I don’t know why you say it’s almost the same.

  2. Hello,

    I just wanted to ask you a little info.

    Currently, the administrators of the German Forum Dotclear try gradually interesting plugins to translate into German.

    Furthermore, important declarations were declared in the meantime in German under the Documentation section.

    This all takes place in leisure time and will be expanded gradually on.

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