Dotclear's proposed aim is to develop a software that fully respects web standards based on open source solutions, with multilingual interface and publishing capabilities. It is written in PHP.

Notable features include handling many blogs, using Wiki or XHTML syntax for entries, adding pages that are independent from the flow of entries and support for several database types: (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite).

Each time you create or edit an entry, a category, a user, etc., Dotclear triggers the recording of the new elements in a Database and puts them in relation with one another (e.g. this entry is linked to this category).

Each time a visitor requires the display of a page on your blog, Dotclear fetches the information in the database, processes it, formats it then displays (or provides) it.