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.