Blog software?

I have a friend helping me set up a website for my in-world business. Part of the website will be a blog where I will post about new releases and other stuff like that. What I am wondering is what 'server-side' blog software other people use out there. I am looking for something that I have a decent amount of ability to customize the look of the blog (I know HTML and CSS fairly well).

Ones I have looked into are Moveable Type, Word Press and Text Pattern. Anyone use these? What are your impressions? Any other suggestions?

Thanks

WordPress, free. Easy to install, hundreds of skins.. etc..
see my blog for a less-the-perfect example.

I'll agree with Burke, I found setting up WordPress a snap and it to have an excellent feature set, from online editing of the skins to automatic RSS feeds. While my host provided an automatic installation option for it, the location was a sub-web, so I uninstalled it and manually downloaded and re-installed at the root with no issues at all.

I looked at this list quite awhile ago, but since I really wasn't looking to "blog" myself, I didn't refer to it when making a selection:

http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm

I looked at that list too but didn't give it much weight since it seems it hasn't been updated for over 2 years.

Installation I don't really care about, I have my geeky friend to do that for me lol.

The thing that strikes me about Word Press is that they all seem to look the same, in general. Same shape, same layout. I'm not sure if shows the lack of ability to modify a WordPress layout easily or people just saying 'meh, good enough'.

It''s updated constantly. Look at wordpress.org.

wordpress is the only way.

What I was saying wasn't updated was the list that Clubside provided a link to. For example it has WordPress at version 1.2 where it is version 2.0.4 now.



Well it seems WordPress has a good following. I'll get rynox to install it and see how well I can get it to follow my idea for a layout.

Any other suggestions?

My bad.

Well. In any blogware, make sure the spam blocklist is up to date if you want to allow comments. I'd also point out that LL's using Wordpress in their blog.

Typo. It's web Two-Point-Oh Approved Buzzword Compliant, complete with AJAXy Ruby on Rails goodness and support for every XMLRPC blogging protocol out there.

I've taken a liking to Joomla with the Joomblog plugin, myself. Its page execution time is very fast. The backend is also configurable enough to do virtually anything you want with it.

Wordpress is nice, but some people have had issues with it being kinda slow. Though, given it's very popular, it should also serve your needs just fine.

Thanks for the Joomla recommendation, Jeffrey, I'm checking it out now. Been using Drupal (drupal.org) which I quite like, but the installation is cumbersome (lots of editing of sql sripts and so on) so I'm in the market for other things to take a poke at.

Lumi

No problem. My sole complaint about Joomla is its URL handling is "funny" when it comes to the default editor app. If you use more than one domain name (or explicit port definitions for HTTP and HTTPS), expect it to act a little odd.

Wordpress and most other PHP-based software should be able to take advantage of the Bad Behavior plugin/system. See its FAQ and install links for current support/porting status.

I personally have not had a speed issue with WP, and I've seen slower weblogs than mine (even with enabling Widget support). I think it's more a function of the hoster you're dealing with, and who your site shares with (if you're using shared hosting).

Last thing - If you want multiple separate weblogs, each will require a separate install of WP. There is a variant around called Wordpress MU that apparantly gets around this, plus a couple workarounds. LL I think is using a single install with multiple allowed posters.

--Alan
:link:

If you want something free, open source, light-footprint and flexible, I recommend blosxom, by Rael Dornfest, O'Reilly Media's CTO.

Despite being "just a manky collection of Perl scripts" as friend once sniffily described it it's happily driven my high traffic blog for almost two years. Its beauty lies in its configurability and its lovely plugin architecture which allows you to infinitely customise the functionality, like that (snaps fingers)

edit: oh, and no database either - it uses the filesystem to handle all of that.

I use WordPress myself for the MechMind website. It works fine.

Drupal is another good blog software; If I had known about it before I might've gone with it instead of WP, as it has seamless Gallery integration.