French ISP Free.fr, providing Internet, TV and telephone access to more than 3.350.000 French households, is now offering a completely free blog service entirely supported by Dotclear. Presently in test phase, this service will be available for everyone, be they customers of the ISP or not.

Free.fr has been providing a no-cost web hosting service known as “pages perso” for several years now, and if installing Dotclear 1 on this platform was not always easy, things changed after the release of Dotclear 2.0 this summer as Yohan, “pages perso” manager, decided to offer PostgreSQL along with MySQL, making it very easy for people with blogs running on Dotclear 1 to migrate to Dotclear 2. Free.fr made other moves to make using Dotclear on “pages perso” smoother and finally decided to offer Dotclear blogs.

A few mails and discussions later, the result is on blog.free.fr. So far the feedback is excellent. One of our French user reported that setting up a Dotclear blog of Free.fr platform barely took 20 seconds. The platform offers the most recent themes and Yohan should add specific enhancements to the platform in the near future. On the technical side, Free.fr blog platforms runs with only one installation of Dotclear, taking full advantage of the multi-blog functionality of the engine.

We are very excited that Dotclear was chosen to run this no-cost, add-free platform, and we think it's a great opportunity for people who wish to start a blog but don't like the technical aspects of installing and managing their own blog application.