Any free or commercial Blogging engine recommendations?

Question

I've recently been thinking about moving from Live Spaces and hosting my own blog. I'm not keen to write my own blog engine from scratch (time constraints, etc).

What kind of functionality should I be looking for in a free or commercial solution? Sitemap? RSS feeds? Tag support? Offline editor? Any recommendations?

Edit: Also happy for recommendations on other blogging sites too

Answer 1

Wordpress is the one I use, and would recommend. It runs on the LAMP stack.

Answer 2

I had recently asked about .net ones: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/151873/what-is-a-good-extendable-blogging-application-for-aspnet

Answer 3

Hosted WordPress is a doddle. For $10/year you can alias your URL to it. Zero maintenance & no hosting charges. Caveat - apparently has some advertising. Has limited Themes but you can pay to hack the CSS if you're keen.

I recently looked into Drupal, Joomla etc. Wordpress was by far the most accessible and easiest to use.

Answer 4

I use BlogEngine.NET for my own blog and it is pretty good. I like the extensions. You can write one yourself, too. Also it is in "active" development. They ship out updates, patches and new versions fairly quickly compared to others.

Here's features and extensions list. You can search for more extensions. Not all of them are in this list.

I looked at following things when I chose my blogging engine:

• Actively being developed
• Easy to modify code-behind to fit my needs (Easy to add more features or fix bugs without waiting for them to ship updates or next versions)
• Easy to create my own themes
• Good spam control
• RSS feeds for categories and comments along with posts.
• Multi-author support

BlogEngine.NET fit all my needs.

I use Windows Live Writer together with it and so far it is working fine for what I need and I'm happy.

SubText and dasBlog are also worth a look.

Answer 5

WordPress hosted in Dreamhost. You can install/upgrade it with a single click. No ads, uses your own domain.

Answer 6

Teligent's Graffitti CMS is not bad at all. It's not open source, but it's quite flexible in terms of configuration.

Answer 7

I use Community Server to host my blog. It's easy to set up, easy to configure and review comments etc., and works well with most blog publishing tools (my preference is Windows Live Writer).

To be honest, it's probably overkill for a simple blogging site. But on the other hand I like knowing that if I want to enable additional functionality such as photos, a downloads section, forums, or anything like that, then I can do so without changing software or having to migrate data.

Answer 8

I used to use my own hand-written blog way back in 2001, then I moved up to simplePhpBlog but then I found WordPress.

I've been using Wordpress on my home page for a couple of years now. I love it. It has just about everything you need built-in except for spam prevention. For that, I also use the WP-SpamFree plugin which does an excellent job of preventing pesky comment spam.

There are tons of plugins available for Wordpress and it is written in PHP so you can hack it if you want (I hacked it to add Gravatar support but the new version has that built in so I guess I should have just waited).

Answer 9

I have a blog on my rented iron at DotNetPark.com. I installed an open source ASP.NET product called dasBlog and have found it to be useful. The theme on this blog is my own development. It is at http://blog.clarkmichael.com. I also have a private blog (used for work to keep my coworkers abreast of what I have been doing, and for security purposes it can't be seen by others), and it is hosted on WordPress. I have found WordPress to be quite friendly and easy to use. DasBlog is quite good, too, and if you like ASP.NET and want to run your own server, I think it's a good choice if you're a dotNetter.

Answer 10

My answer is a bit late but for blogging I like the Serendipity framework - it is open source and available at www.s9y.org.

My blog uses it - you can check it out at www.dereketnyre.com

Answer 11

Wordpress is definitely the current hot blogging platform. It is very easy to install on your server, has a huge library of plugins and adding new themes is a doddle. It is free and open-source too, meaning it is constantly improving and the updates are free.

Other software options include Movable Type and Expression Engine.

If you don't want to host your own software you can also use a web-based solution. Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, Typepad.com are all excellent web based blog apps but they each have a slight variation on the theme.

For example, blogger.com allows you to add Google ads, Typepad is marketed toward being extremely easy to use and Wordpress.com has the advantage of getting you familiar with the admin console in case you move to their popular self-hosted solution in the future.