Chyrp is a very lightweight blogging engine, created by the same person and ideas that worked on the Lingua Project, as profiled in this blog in April last year. When a blogging engine initially was designed as a very lightweight application, it tend to support a specific group of users that want to personalize it as easily as possible. On the other hand, it also means it will be less room for a user to build something out of it and trying to make this blogging engine a fully functional content management system (CMS).

The first version of Chyrp was released in December last year. I found myself delayed in writing the review of this application because of the immature of its functionality. And after the version 1.0.3, the last stable release, I can see some of the bugs or problems have been addressed by Chyrp. Chyrp indeed can be considered as a post-project of Lingua, driven by PHP and MySQL and the additional capability of Ajax. As I look at the availability of extensions in Chyrp community, there is a very small number of developers that currently working on improve the Chyrp engine. However, a differentiation advantage can arise if you compare this blogging engine with WordPress or Movable Type, both open source blogging engines, Chyrp seem to be relatively easy for beginners to maintain and they’re apparently headed in this direction.

I’ve been tracking a new blogging engine, Lingua Project which powered by PHP, MySQL, and Ajax. If you really would like to know what a Lingua is all about, you can visit their official blog, that run with the Lingua software, i.e. version 0.1 Alpha. Their developers are completing some coding practices with respect to spam protection, such as the integration with Akismet software, default theme redesign, and improving its existing administration control panel. In other words, Lingua software still not completed yet, as you can see the progress on this Development Web page.

Lingua Project is found by Alex Suraci; (his home page is temporarily unavailable at the time of writing). In the recent years, the competition for blogging softwares is also intensified over the past few years. For a new player such as Lingua to stand out of the crowd, what they can do is developing the enhanced features of flexibility. Flexibility is critical for a newly released software. Thus, they planned to develop a WordPress importer, that allowed users of WordPress easily switch their blogs to this software. Also, I believe they need to find at least a few Web hosting companies that want to be their partners in offering a one-click install service for the users that want their blogs host under this engine.