Choosing a Blogging Program
I’ve come into this with no prior knowledge, so I had no idea what was a available to support a blog. A quick google and I quickly became familiar with what I guess are the usual suspects- WordPress, Typepad, Movable Type, B2Evolution, Expression Engine, Drupal, Joomla.
Apparently the last 2 are considered Content Management Systems, but the make it into a lot of the conversations. This is what I looked at.The overwhelming favourites appeared to be WordPress and Typepad, although you don’t need to look hard to find plenty of references for the others.
WordPress seemed to be the best supported in terms of the Wiki it provided, its availability on webhosts without the need to upload and install it yourself and the number of sites out there with hints, tips and templates etc.
Movable Type seems pretty well supported too, but there is a fair bit of confusion around the licensing, what is free and what is not. I think that it is now free for all uses and you pay for the commercial support, but I’m not sure and there are responses to old support suggesting that this or that is in the paid version.
What is did look into was the amount of support there is for switching an existing blog from one platform to another. There is plenty. So for me it was a decision between WordPress and Movable Type. I looked at the features for both and they both seemed to have everything I could imagine using. Every webhost provider I loked at had one click installation of wordpress (more on that later), and the WordPress support is comprehensive- there is everything I could imagine wanting at wordpress.org. So I went with it.