Which Blog – Self Hosted

So you’ve decided on a self hosted blog?  You have some webspace and you just need to know which Blog System to use?  Well…

Naturally, it’s not straightforward!

I’m going to cover some of the major blog engines and why I would or wouldn’t use them.

B2Evolution

B2Evolution is actually a pretty good engine, which can be bent round to do a lot more than Wordpress without much problem, certainly with less bother than Wordpress.  In addition to this it has some much more advanced and detailed SEO settings and some really nice settings for the more expert user.  The only reason I didn’t use B2Evolution for this blog was because Wordpress simply has more stuff out there on the web and a much larger repository of plugins.

Nucleus

Put simply as I can, I don’t use nucleus because it lacks the community support, it has a fairly small amount of plugins, the SEO isn’t all that, and the demo link on their website leads to a page that says “This site is gone forever due to abuse”.  I mean, you’d just delete the link wouldn’t you??

Wordpress

Wordpress is by far the most full featured blog in the world simply because of it’s thousands of plugins.  It’s most supported, most experimented with, and most easy to install (about 4 or 5 steps) and it’s pretty simple to make a theme for it.  Recent additions of a query system to only list some posts, and it’s rather good-ness with SEO make Wordpress a bit of a winner each time.  The back end is nice, the front end can be anything you want, and it runs on nearly any system.

Only thing with Wordpress is that it’s basically for the more serious blogger.  It’s got settings that your average livejournaler wouldn’t need, and with this in mind, I’m also recommending:

Chyrp

Chyrp is an awesome little program that has only just really surfaced.  Taking the easy install elements and SEO functionality of Wordpress and the different post types of Tumblr, making it a perfect solution for a quick-setup self hosted blog for fairly casual reasons.  If you want a blog where you just write stuff, and share stuff, then this is pretty much the best solution I’ve seen.  It has a simple theme system and a growing number of straightforward plugins.

Related posts:

1. Which Blog? – Hosted
2. Has Wordpress Killed Your Spider?