Oxite: Open Source Content Management System from Microsoft

Microsoft today released an early version of a Content Management System called Oxite aimed at developers who want to build blogs or CMS with ASP.NET MVC. Oxite supports essential features for blogs like pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting (with optional moderation), gravatars support, RSS feeds at any page level, support for MetaWebLog API (possible to use clients like windows live writer for blogging), web admin panel etc.

According to Microsoft it is standards compliant and highly extensible platform, it powers MIX online site. It supports pages and sub-pages, built-in authentication system among other things.

It may not be useful for the average Joe, because it is built on ASP.NET and uses SQL Server DB. These technologies need windows hosting to run and windows hosting is expensive compared to Linux hosting which most of the bloggers use.

If you are a ASP.NET developer and want to get your hands on Oxite download it from codeplex. The most exciting part of the announcement is that it is released under open source.