…and TypePad, and Blogger, too.
This new release from Microsoft sounds promising. Based on the description and feature list, it’s a direct competitor for WordPress:
Oxite is an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites. We know this because it runs MIX Online.
[…]
Oxite provides you with a strong foundation you can build upon – pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting (with optional moderation), gravatar support, RSS feeds at any page level, support for MetaWebLog API (think Windows Live Writer integration made easy), web admin panel, support for Open Search format allowing users to search your site using their browser’s search box, and more
You can get a pretty good idea of how it works from this video:
Of course, the biggest strength of WordPress is the developer/user community that has grown around it. Because Oxite is open source, Microsoft can tap the expertise of its own enthusiast developer community. That should allow the platform to grow much more quickly than it would if releases depended on the small team at Microsoft that produced Oxite.
This one is worth watching.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
I have been using Graffiti from telligent. They pretty much ignored the user community, stopped responding to support requests and now they say they are back. I am not so sure I can trust them again. So I am going to take a close look at this “Oxite” product.
Thanks for sharing!
Hey Ed,
Thanks for the note, appreciate the excitement.
The goal of Oxite is to show Developers that you can write applications that support web standards with the Microsoft platform.
Compared to things like WordPress or Community Server, Oxite is not as sophisiticated. I could not imagine an end user today making the move to Oxite. We do hope developers will use it as a base for the apps they write in the future and that they help us fill it out further.
-Jeff (Microsoft)
I spent a couple hours checking it out, on a whim. I followed their installation instructions, installing MS Visual Web Developer EE and the ASP.NET MVC component. When attempting to run the initial installation I received an error and a stack traceback related to my SQL database connection.
I might try testing this again when I have more time. This comment is simply notice to someone who wants to give it a quick trial spin like I did: You’re probably better off with a prior understanding of MS development products like Visual Studio.
Which I don’t have. I might very well have followed their instructions wrong (damn ADD kicking in) to boot. I’m not too well-versed in Visual Studio IDE—although I’ve used it enough to appreciate some of the power it offers. It’s just a hurdle I can’t clear at this time. I ended up uninstalling everything I installed, rather than pursue my problem.
This is in no way meant to disparage the Oxite project; it’s just one CMS novice’s superficial experience. I’ve never used WordPress but I have installed Drupal and other PHP-based CMSes. One day I hope to explore Oxite further.
Hi Dan,
I’m one of the guys that wrote Oxite. Sorry you’re having troubles with it. If you’d like to jump over to http://www.codeplex.com/Oxite and start a discussion about your problems feel free and we can check it out.
Keep in mind though that this project is really aimed at developers so knowledge of Visual Studio is required. If you’d like to using Oxite as a learning tool to learn how to build ASP.NET MVC apps, we’d be happy to help.
Thanks for checking out Oxite! 🙂
The problem is paying for everything from Microsoft. WordPress is so easy because Apache is free, PHP is free, and MySQL is free (along with phpMyAdmin).
Also, most people who buy websites end up with a Linux box which is usually loaded with Apache/MySQL/PHP, so that makes WordPress (among others, sure) easy! If Microsoft really wants to compete in this field, and lets face it WordPress is mostly used by smaller websites than by huge corporate sites, they are going to have to offer a lot over all the quick and easy benefits of WordPress.
Cory, I think you can develop and deploy Oxite without buying a lot of stuff from MS. You can download VS Express Edition and the other components for free. You would, of course, already be using Windows which you paid for.
The idea of using the same set of tools for the entire gamut from small blog to complex web portal is very appealing. That’s why I checked this out, as above.
To deploy a site created with Oxite, I think you must employ a web server running ASP.NET. That isn’t free, but many providers offer that type of hosting for the same price as Linux hosting. You can still use MySQL or other databases. (I’m not sure if you’d need PHP, but it’s still free to deploy should you require it. I am a little out of my depth here.)
My hosting provider points out in his blog that MS server products are easy to deploy and easy to justify. More so when he factors in volume discounts and the level of support he receives. So much so that he dropped his Linux hosting offerings. I’m very happy with my provider, and I switched from a Linux-based provider (YMMV and I’m not any kind of power user.)
I’m not carrying water for MS, but they deserve defense on this point, which I hear often. Ed probably wouldn’t want this thread to become a debate about LAMP vs. WAMP vs. something else.
Dan, that’s what I mean. Visual Studios Express is stripped down compared to the Standard Edition, and a Microsoft OS server, like I said, is more expensive than a LAMP stack.
WordPress is great! I’m glad I moved away from Telligent’s CommunityServer.
Also, WordPress isn’t limited to Linux/Apache. I have mine running on a WIMP stack (WindowsServer2003, IIS6, MySQL, PHP) just fine.
I’d be willing to give Oxite a chance if someone builds a migration tool 🙂