Maneno was a blogging application powered by PHP, Smarty, and MySQL with content management capabilities. Initially released in October, 2008, it focused on creating a multi-theme, multi-author, multi-lingual system that works in a hosted setting . The name Maneno means 'words' in Swahili and the site focused on having low latency/filesize options to make it fast to load on low bandwidth connections . Additionally, it had an architecture that allowed for heavy customization by end users. The core of the system was envisioned after a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008 by two of the founders. They realized that while trying to write articles from the country via VSAT connections, the connection speeds proved incredibly slow and discouraging for not only them, but anyone striving to pursue citizen journalism endeavors . Additionally it was shown that the language spheres of Africa had nearly no crossover between one another. Taking these issues into account and coming to the conclusion that no current blogging system adequately addressed them, this entirely new platform for blogging was created to serve the African blogging community. More information...
According to PR-model, maneno.org is ranked 747,157th in multilingual Wikipedia, in particular this website is ranked 2nd in Bambara Wikipedia.
The website is placed before beersonfilm.com and after altaybat.net in the BestRef global ranking of the most important sources of Wikipedia.
