Best blogging tool to integrate into an existing website

Question

Hi all,

I'm looking for an easy way to integrate a blog into a website that I've developed with HTML and CSS and have already put a considerable amount of time and effort into. I've looked at WordPress, Movable Type, b2evolution, and a few others, but they all seem like overkill for me. I'm only going to be posting 1 maybe 2 times a week at most.

Plus, all of the aforementioned tools seem hard to customize. I want my blog to look like the rest of my website, but I don't want to rebuild my site based on one of the blogging tools. Because, as I said before, I've already spent a lot of time rebuilding the site using HTML and CSS.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Since you find it hard to customise existing platforms to your needs, I suggest that you roll out your own simplistic blogging software which you will certainly be able to customise. However, this requires time and is probably a wheel reinvention.

Answer 2

I've found WordPress to have the biggest support community and extensions library. And the code is generally pretty easy to understand and integrate. It depends on what you want to integrate, obviously. I've found user management reasonable, and since it's based on PHP I can embed class libraries with my own modular functionality. But there are others that have the same characteristics in general terms. What you get for sure is a very popular blog engine, which is not trivial.

If you are adept at HTML and CSS you can easily embed the blog functionality into whatever theme design you care to create.

Answer 3

Adapting your template for Wordpress is extremely easy. Slice your template (code-wide) into 3 sections, the top, the content, and the bottom. The top and the bottom can pretty much stay the same and go into header.php and footer.php (of the Wordpress template system). It's the content that requires a little bit of tweaking for adaption.

You can then easily copy and paste the contents of your pre-existing pages, and re-create them as pages or blog posts under Wordpress.

That's pretty much all.