What's The Best Blog Software

[mzwebfreak 0]

In my search for the perfectly formattable (for me) blog, I've tried to use Moveable Type, Wordpress, even used a tutorial on codegrrl.com for how to make your own blog, and I have to say that Blogger is my favorite. Yes, it's not exactly the best for a complete novice if you plan on playing around with the code at all, but, aside from some trial and error (where I found out, among other things, that you can have the blog page AND archives be published as fully integrated php files), it generally works just fine for me.

[soleimanian 0]

MT and WordPressMT is more poweful WordPress, but free version has 1 writerI prefer WordPress

[iGuest 3]

Well i feel thatif you are trying or starting your own blo then The BlogHoster is the best blogging script available on the net,but it is not free.

[ddlworld 0]

tell me more please

[koolio 0]

I would also vote for wordpress. Blogger is just simple. Wordpress is a bit complex but the admin interface is clean and easy to use. If you don't wish to setup a wordpress blog yourself you can use a service like http://www.blogsome.com/ to get your own blog.
To make it professional you can mess up with the template and stylesheet to create your own theme. Or else you can use a them already made.
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/
https://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes/Theme_List
I think wordpress has the most number of themes

[StarGaiz 0]

What did you mean "professionally tainted"?

Personally, I prefer WordPress, it's nice, easy and highly configurable. (in an easy way)..I am the type of gal that loves to configure theings, I love tweaking things LOL. I suppose it all dependson your wishes for the blog. ALthough I've seen some really nice things in Nucleus, I stick with WordPress. My suggestion, test them. Usually their sites have a preview going WordPress can look as personal as you want, but it can also be more professionally tainted

*just saw Foamy, so I am not in my normal doings here LOL*

[StarGaiz 0]

Am thinking of trying to start a blog, and would like to use Thesis for WordPress, but don't want to spend any money on it right now, until I graduate in May.So I may just do one in Blogger. It's not really possible to transfer previous blog posts to a new blog hosted with a different blogging site later, right? Like whatever posts I make in Blogger, wouldn't be transferrable to a new blog I later create in Word Press, correct? Just thought I'd ask.Thanks

[Bocarius 0]

I don't know about software. But great "tools" are web templates that allow to design your blog as you wish. I like to change templates (e. g from free web templates) for my mood. But it not for all blog directories

[vhortex 1]

What did you mean "professionally tainted"?

You replied to a post that is 5 years ago.

What he means base on my understand was that wordpress have been moving towards professional development and with hundreds of professional plugins and themes, it won't be so hard to convert this free blog system to a professional website.

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About importing post/contents from a certain blog system to another blog system:

There are numerous converter/importer plugin or services for this need, some are free and some are paid. I usually transfer my contents manually by uploading the videos to the new blog system (wordpress) from blogspot (or any equivalent). The database then gets analyzed and 'mapped' into the correct format that wordpress (as an example) expects. You need to be good ad database handling and have at least a minimal understanding on how data was being saved and where the files get saved.

Either way you used (via plugin paid/free or manual method) to migrate your content, you will always need to manually edit some links and edit content authors. Embedded videos should also be manually checked if they are pointing to the correct plugin/file.

[StarGaiz 0]

Oh, thank you. So when it ever came time to transfer posts to a new blog & layout, if either I get really good at understanding how to do it, or pay someone that can do it well for me...would it be right to understand that posts would then still be imported to the new one with the same individual, original dates of creation on each one? So people could still look back through the 'archives' and read back to the first post on day one, etc.?

Thanks for the help.
-Krystal

You replied to a post that is 5 years ago.
What he means base on my understand was that wordpress have been moving towards professional development and with hundreds of professional plugins and themes, it won't be so hard to convert this free blog system to a professional website.

-------

About importing post/contents from a certain blog system to another blog system:

There are numerous converter/importer plugin or services for this need, some are free and some are paid. I usually transfer my contents manually by uploading the videos to the new blog system (wordpress) from blogspot (or any equivalent). The database then gets analyzed and 'mapped' into the correct format that wordpress (as an example) expects. You need to be good ad database handling and have at least a minimal understanding on how data was being saved and where the files get saved.

Either way you used (via plugin paid/free or manual method) to migrate your content, you will always need to manually edit some links and edit content authors. Embedded videos should also be manually checked if they are pointing to the correct plugin/file.

[8ennett 0]

Well it would simply be a case of finding a way to either convert the current database to one your new blog software can support (eg renaming, adding, removing tables, fields and database name) or writing a simple php script to extract all the rows from the old database and reformat them then insert the new values in to the new database.The dates and times etc. in the database will all use a standard unix timestamp, and even they don't (which would only be in complete amateur software) you can still use php's strtotime() function to convert them in to one. So all your previous blog entries that have been moved to a new blog software package will keep their original posting times and dates and will usually be called using php's date() function.I wouldn't advise anyone pay for someone else to do this fairly simplish task, it would be a waste of money. You should have seen it when I had to convert a life assurance company's old database to a new system, now that was a mess merely because of the amount of data that needed transferring, and because the old database and new database were on completely different types of server they weren't compatible in any way and I couldn't bridge the network completely. We had to employ two temps to manually input some of the data from an old unix system on to a windows 2000 database.

[vhortex 1]

Oh, thank you. So when it ever came time to transfer posts to a new blog & layout, if either I get really good at understanding how to do it, or pay someone that can do it well for me...would it be right to understand that posts would then still be imported to the new one with the same individual, original dates of creation on each one? So people could still look back through the 'archives' and read back to the first post on day one, etc.?
Thanks for the help.
-Krystal

This is on addition to what 8ennett said

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The decision to pay for transferring the contents is up to you but be cautious that a plugin that work for a certain user won't mean it will also work with you. Your best bet was to find a good person that understand how the database was being laid out. You only need to get the paid approach if you are uncertain that you know how data was being mapped to the source database and the new database.

Data migration can be easy if you are using well known blog systems as source and as target new system. Most of the time for a person that have middle level knowledge with databases and queries, paying for a person to do the conversion/migration can be a waste of time and money unless the person doing the job was a professional one which will take the pain to verify everything from author mapping, links, date of posting (can be easily done) and plugin equivalents to use.

Lets assume that you have 1 year worth of data that needs to be migrated to a new blog system and your previous blog system have around 300 contents which most of them have links in them, have video files that uses the previous blog system file directory structure and images that was being delivered by a 'lightbox' like plugin. Migrating this amount of data can start to be a pain and will take a long time to complete with no errors. You also need to note that some blog system plugin inserts video by using plugin only readable coding like [jwplayer mediaid=336] which will appear as plain text [jwplayer mediaid=336] after migrating while on the source blog system it is displaying a video player and a video which have an id of 336 from the media library. This is the time that you need to pay someone to do the conversion unless you want to handle it personally.

For blog contents that is purely text and a few images on them, even if the total post counts was more than 300.. it is still relatively easy to import them due to the nature of the content that needs to be moved. Paying someone to do the job can be a total waste of money.

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For an example of a plugin only video link
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ - this is a plugin code tag being rendered into a full video player, the actual code that displays the video was [mediaplay id=xxxx] where xxxx is a video ID. If this post will be migrated to for example to MODxcms (where I am also actively contributing), every text post will appear 'OK' but on the top part where the video should appear will have this text [mediaplay id=xxxx] with no video player.

There are also some plugins that degrade perfectly having the content non dependent to the plugin that formats them and a good example for this was this link

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ - when the plugin that displays the SQL command with line numbers and highlighting was not present on the new blog system, the SQL command will display as pure text and no damage was done.

For content that is mostly text
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ - this content is non plugin dependent and was safe for migration.


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This small step will ease up migration problems in the future.

Move all images, videos and sounds (if any was present) to a folder that is non dependent to the current blog system.
- in my case i usually create an extra folder then create sub-folders inside it and link all videos, images and sound files to this folders. This way when I migrate the contents on my old blog, I will only migrate the database then upload a copy of this folder on the new web hosting/blog system.

-while other users that have wordpress as a blog software have their contents on http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ I have mine at http://myblogsite.com/rg-erdr.php?_rpo=t since when I change for example to drupal as my main blog software, drupal won't surely have a folder named '/wp-content', this avoids editing all the contents to make sure all images, video and sound files will still point to a correct link.
Edited September 16, 2010 by vhortex (see edit history)

[Illustrious 0]

I like WordPress. It allows more customization of user control over blogs. You can integrate scripts, get access to unlimited themes for your blog, and get tons of plugins. Also, it is better for search engines.