BlogML is an open format

Open format

An open file format is a published specification for storing digital data, usually maintained by a standards organization, which can therefore be used and implemented by anyone. For example, an open format can be implementable by both proprietary and free and open source software, using the typical...

 derived from XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 to store and restore the content of a blog

Blog

A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

.

History

BlogML was originally created by Darren Neimke in August 2005 by starting a Workspace on GotDotNet community. In July 2006, BlogML was moved to CodePlex for better Open Source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 development and some other developers joined this project. BlogML has hit three versions so far. Versions 0.9 and 1.0 released on GotDotNet and version 2.0 released on CodePlex. After moving this project to CodePlex, Keyvan Nayyeri joined this project and added some new features for BlogML 2.0.

In addition to BlogML specification, there is a rich set of .NET Framework

.NET Framework

The .NET Framework is a software framework that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large library and supports several programming languages which allows language interoperability...

 APIs provided by the BlogML team for .NET developers to work with markup easier.

BlogML is supported by many .NET blogging tools such as Community Server

Community Server

Telligent Community is a community and collaboration software platform developed by Telligent Systems and was first released in 2004.Telligent Community is built on the Telligent Evolution platform, with a variety of core applications running on top of it such as blogs, forums, media galleries, and...

, Subtext

Subtext Weblog Software

Subtext is a blog publishing system written in C# on ASP.NET. All data is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database.The latest release of Subtext is 2.5, released on June 6, 2010...

, Single User Blog, BlogEngine.NET, and DasBlog. Also there are some implementations for other blogging engines and services such as Blogger

Blogger (service)

Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish...

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Main goals

BlogML is created for some main goals:

1. Ability to port blog content between Blog Engines:
   1. This is the case where you might have a blog based on .Text version 0.95 and you want to upgrade to Community Server
      Community Server
      Telligent Community is a community and collaboration software platform developed by Telligent Systems and was first released in 2004.Telligent Community is built on the Telligent Evolution platform, with a variety of core applications running on top of it such as blogs, forums, media galleries, and...
      
      . Having an "Export to BlogML" in .Text and an "Import from BlogML" function in Community Server
      Community Server
      Telligent Community is a community and collaboration software platform developed by Telligent Systems and was first released in 2004.Telligent Community is built on the Telligent Evolution platform, with a variety of core applications running on top of it such as blogs, forums, media galleries, and...
      
       would totally solve this problem.
2. Ability to port blog content between Blog Engine Versions:
   1. Same as above.
3. Ability to port blog content between Storage Providers:
   1. This is the case where you might be using a blogging engine such as Single User Blog and you are running from one provider - such as DotTextProvider (where the content reads and writes to an existing .Text schema) and you want to continue to use Single User Blog but move to a new data structure. In this case you would configure Single User Blog to use the DotTextProvider and run an "Export to BlogML" function, then you would re-configure your provider to your native provider and run the "Import from BlogML" function.
4. Ability to easily back-up a blog:
   1. Here you would run some sort of scheduled job to automatically run the "Export to BlogML" function and save the output as a compressed backup file somewhere.