Oxite: Microsoft’s new Blogging and CMS Platform

Microsoft today released an early version of Oxite, an open source CMS (Content Management System) that can power anything from small blogs to big web sites.

Microsoft Oxite offers almost everything you need in a good blogging platform - anonymous or authenticated commenting, comment moderation, gravatar support, RSS feeds, pingbacks, trackbacks, SEO optimized clean URLs, multiple blogs, group blogging and support for custom pages.

Oxite vs WordPress and Blogger

Oxite, at least in the current incarnation, is not targeted at the end user, but at developers who need to create CMS applications using the Microsoft Platform.

Also, Oxite is based on the Microsoft stack - ASP.NET MVC and SQL Server - and therefore requires Windows hosting. One of the reasons behind WordPress' growing popularity is the easy availability of cheap Linux based PHP and MySQL hosting.

It is obvious that Microsoft has no plans to grab market share from Blogger or WordPress as the Oxite software package is too complex for most consumers. However, if your organization is looking to build a blog platform or CMS from scratch, the IT team may well consider making Oxite as their base app.

Like WordPress and Blogger, Oxite does support the MetaWebLog API so it should be easy for end users to publish content via Windows Live Writer and other existing blog clients.