When it comes to blogging, you can rapidly drown yourself in the ocean of available solutions. Dotclear, Wordpress, Blogger, Skyblog, Kelblogs, Squarespace... You name it! However, all those heavy contenders may lack a bit of simplicity. That's where Chyrp comes to play.

Chyrp is a blogging engine designed to be very lightweight while retaining functionality. It is driven by PHP and MySQL (with some AJAX thrown in), and has a theme and module engine, so you can personalize it the way you want.

Chyrp is an hybrid between a lightweight feed client like Twitter and a full blogging platform like Wordpress. It’s built with simplicity in mind and it’s made basically so you can do what you want with it. It’s also open source, so if you happen to be displeased with anything, you’re free to do your own tweaking. Chyrp is flexible enough to be used in any context — whether it be for your personal thoughts or for corporate propaganda. It comes with a number of optional plugins that'll add more and more functionalities as diverse as comments, twitter, Jaiku, WYSIWYG editing, foreign languages or Google Analytics support.

Chyrp relies on good old HTML for rich text formatting of both blog entries and pages — a blessing for anyone who doesn't want to learn yet another markup language. However, despite beeing extremely simple it won't sacrifice the essential features, like saving a post as a draft for later editing or limiting its visibility to registered users only.

If you plan to turn your blog into a money-making collaborative publishing platform, then Chyrp probably won't be the right choice. However, if you are looking for a lightweight blogging engine that you can easily customize to fit your less ambitious needs, check out Chyrp.

» Click here to download Chyrp