I’ve recently decided to build a new open source blog engine powered by Umbraco called Articulate. There’s a few reasons why i wanted to do this:

• Since my full time job is an Umbraco core developer, I spend most of my time building Umbraco and get very little time for using Umbraco. I wanted to change this dilemma and really use Umbraco and utilize many of the features we’ve been creating and try to push some of it’s boundaries. For me this is a perfect way to find inspiration for new Umbraco features and enhancements.
• I’ve wanted to move my blog away from BlogEngine.Net to Umbraco for quite some time (dogfooding) but I really needed to have every feature that I use in BlogEngine.Net available
• I wanted to make the blog experience as simple as possible in Umbraco
• I wanted to be able to write blog posts directly from my mobile phone easily using the web

I’ve got some documentation written and I’ll keep updating this over time but hopefully there’s enough there to get you started. Since Articulate is open source and hosted on GitHub, any community contributions are hugely welcomed :) Whether that’s core code additions, fixes, documentation, etc… any contribution is a big help.

Articulate templates are based on themes and I think it would be super awesome if people started creating their own themes and releasing them as their own packages or including them in the Articulate core for release. Creating themes is really easy and in fact a few of the themes included with Articulate are open source MIT licensed themes migrated over from the Ghost blogging platform (which is also very easy to do).

The first version of Articulate is out and can be downloaded either from the Umbraco package repository or from GitHub. There are a few minor bugs in this release that have been reported and fixed and I’ll have a newer version out this week.