LifeType (formerly known as pLog) is an open-source blogging platform with enticing features for both big blogging communities and casual bloggers alike. LifeType is multi-blog and multi-user out of the box, and end users will enjoy its friendly user interface, the generation of clean XHTML code and the powerful file management area for managing resources and attaching them to our posts. Other exciting features include a customizable template system with caching support, native support for subdomains with custom URLs, a powerful plugin framework, fully localizable from the ground up, generation and syndication of RSS feeds, support trackbacks and the metaWeblog XMLRPC API, and many more! LifeType is extensible via plugins, that will add new exciting features such as moblogging, integration with Flickr and Gallery2, shoutbox, and many morel.

Bloggers love it

User Friendly Interface

Writing articles is comfortable with the included state of the art WYSIWYG editor. Adding pictures and sound files (for Podcasting) is just a matter of browse and click.
The Dashboard provides you with all the information you need every time you log in. Recent articles, comments and trackback as well as brief statistics get you updated about your blog immediately.

Integrated Media Management

Podcasting, automatic thumbnail generation, mass uploading of files, a filebrowser and custom descriptions for each file is supported through the administration interface

Choose your Style

Looking for a nice design for your weblog? Go check out the many freely available templates. Installation is as easy as uploading a file through your administration interface!

Add a Feature

If you're looking for a feature not available with the standard installation, you will probably find it in the wiki plugins overview, providing you with over 60 features for you to add in no time.
Some of the most popular are: Moblogging, Template Editor und Nested Comments.

Built-in anti-spam Filter

The built-in bayesian spam filter keeps comments and trackbacks in you blog clean. And comment moderation, Captchas and trackback validation is available through plugins.

Support for Trackbacks

Trackback blogs you read by simply linking to them! LifeType will automatically find the trackback URL of the blog you are linking to.

Multiple Users per Blog

You can easily give your friends permissions to write in your weblog, making collaborative web sites even easier!

Easy Installation

The installation wizard will take you through the installation - it's a breeze! And there's no need to edit configuration files, you can control all the settings through the administration interface

Mobile features

Are you into moblogging? Do you need to blog wherever you are? Do you need to easily provide low bandwidth versions of your site for mobile devices? Using the appropiate plugins, LifeType becomes the first mobile-ready application of its kind with seamless integration for publishing to and accessing blogs.

Administrators trust it

Multiple Blogs in one Installation

With it's multi blog, multi user setup and strict separation of single weblog administration and overall administration LifeType is idealy suited for blog hosting. It's all provided through a single installation and one single database.

Central Page for Communities

Easy 4 step registration for new weblogs, an overwiev of newest and most popular blogs as well as a user and blog index, everything ready to go with your intallation of LifeType.

Subdomains

Provide your users with nice subdomains like username.yourdomain.com or blogname.yourdomain.com. (you need to be able to set up wildcards on your domain to use this feature) If that's not enough, LifeType is also able to serve several different domains with one single installation!

Easily Localizable

Localization is done on a per blog basis. Through just one single file you may translate in any language you like. But before you start your translation make sure it's not already done! LifeType supports any encoding and the latest version has been translated to many languages including French, German, Spanish, chinese and many more.

Performance

Template caching, data object caching and serious code refactoring to improve performance and keep the system load as minimal as possible make LifeType fast and reliable even with very large and busy communites.

Geeks need it

Nice Looking URLs

Creat your own customized URLs for SEO or to adapt your them to your language. Toggle a setting in the configuration of the site and LifeType will automatically use cruft-free URLs instead of the old style, raw ones.

Nice and Clean Code

LifeType is based on a Model-View-Controller framework providing flexibility and scalability. Documentation is generated with Doxygen and the most recent API is always available.

Clean Content

The default templates included in LifeType are XHTML 1.0 Strict, and so is the content generated by LifeType. Worried about generating correct and standard mark-up? Worry no longer!

Powerful Plugin Framework

The impressive plugin capabilities let's you add about any feature you like. With filters, events, registration of new actions, localization, MVC support (self-contained), perfect integration into the administration interface and template support you can add about any functionality you can think off.

Smarty Templates

Don't like any of the existing templates? No worries!
LifeType is built on top of the fantastic Smarty template engine, providing unprecedented power to template developers without compromising security, since Smarty templates do not allow by default to add potentially dangerous PHP code to our templates. This is specially important if you use LifeType to provide a blogging service to a community.

XMLRPC

LifeType supports an XMLRPC interface for remote creating and editing articles. And of course you may ping as many directories as you like with the inbuilt XMLRPC ping service. XMLRPC pings are enabled/disabled per article.

Demo Site

The kind folks at OpenSourceCMS.com have installed a demo version of LifeType that is available to everyone: click to visit the demo site.

Requirements and License

LifeType requires at least PHP 4.3.0 and MySQL 3.23 to run. Regarding PHP, it is recommended to run the most recent version of either the PHP4 (4.4.0) or PHP5 branches (PHP 5.1.0). Apache is the preferred web server but LifeType should run fine under any web server as long as PHP is supported (including Microsoft Internet Information Services)

LifeType has been built on and for Linux and Unix servers, but it will run on the Windows platform without any problem (both under Apache and Microsoft Internet Information Services)

If you are planning to use advanced features such as customized URLs you will need support for ForceType in your Apache configuration. If you are planning to use the subdomains feature, you will need a domain configured to accept wildcard subdomains as well as a correctly configured Apache server.

LifeType is licensed under the GNU General Public License.