Blogging Software - Wordpress vs BlogEngine.NET vs Anything else

Question

Basically I need to choose one so that, I can get familiar with it quickly and then customize it to my needs.

I'm a .NET developer and know classic ASP too. But I think understanding PHP will not be a problem for me and also think that it won't be that difficult.

What will you like to recommend me?

UPDATE:-
Sorry that I'm adding this info late. Right now I don't know what customization I will be doing. But I'm sure going forward I will have my own requirement and will need to customize. So I don't want to be in situation where I will have to say "This engine which I'm using will not allow me XYZ change or it will be too difficult for me to make XYZ change in this blogging software, so lets migrate to something else."

I will prefer a short learning curve.

Answer 1

Go with Wordpress. It's easily customisable, and there's masses and masses of information on customising it.

• Digging into Wordpress
• Wordpress docs
• Thematic - a Wordpress theme designed to be easily customisable/extensible.

Answer 2

Wordpress is nice, but if you're a .NET developer BlogEngine.NET is extremely easy to extend. The drawback is the much smaller community and resources, but if you're wanting to do some real customization and tweaking, BlogEngine will probably fit your tastes much better. There is a decent development community backing and supporting customization and plugins for BlogEngine, but you'll find that a lot of the information is outdated or maintenance has been forgotten.

If you're wanting something with tons of community widgets, plug-ins and tons of themes, Wordpress is your prime choice without a question. But that's if you're going with the canned solutions. There are a lot of them, and you can still customize them and tweak things, but that's dependent on how comfortable you feel about picking up a new paradigm. Wordpress customization isn't so much PHP development, as it is Wordpress development, since you'll be so deep in Wordpress' own world and API.

Both are available in MS's Web Platform Installer, check them out of your box and play around with them some. It's really going to come down to which one you feel just fits. I've used both for different projects, but I've fallen back on doing my own thing with BlogEngine more than Wordpress. But that's for my own personal stuff.

Answer 3

If you know .NET and C#, facing PHP and mySql is going to feel like you went back to 19th century and have to burn coal in your "car" instead of tanking your beamer at a local gas station :-)

One particularly interesting thing about BlogEngine.NET is that out of the box it will run without SQL Server - just with XML files as a storage. If you know your programming I don't have to tell you what kind of flexibility that provides. Not that I'd recommend actually running a web site for a long time without SQL Server but such dual backing opens some very interesting options.

Should I mention that it comes with Visual Studio sln and proj files? :-) That pretty much means zero learning curve.