What's the best blogging platform?

[PeterAlexLeigh]

I've always used Wordpress without really giving it much thought, but I'm open to trying out a different platform for a new blog.

Can anyone give me some advantages or reasons to move to a different platform?

Thanks!

[RyanKent]

I have seen this question asked numerous times both on SEOmoz and other sites. The overwhelming consensus is Wordpress is the world's number one blog platform.

WP is the most popular, has the most websites using the software, the most extensions, the most active support forums, etc. WP offers plenty of templates so you have a huge variety of options and they are relatively inexpensive. If you require higher levels of technical support, it is not difficult to find a WP developer.

Can anyone give me some advantages or reasons to move to a different platform?

With the above understood, I investigated about a dozen CMS solutions earlier this year so I could determine which content platform would work best for me. My desire was to learn one platform which could meet all my needs. I desired the best solution irregardless of cost or other factors. I decided to go with Joomla and am happy with my decision.

Joomla is probably the 2nd most popular blog platform. It is also open source (i.e. free) and has many extensions, an active support forums, plenty of templates, etc. The biggest drawback for Joomla is it has a lot higher learning curve for admins and developers then WP. The biggest advantage is it offers a lot more flexibility to do many more things besides blogging.

[PeterAlexLeigh]

Ryan - Nice, I'll give Joomla a look in

Thanks

[Timmmmy]

before moving to pure ecommerce/digital marketing this year, I worked in digital news publishing for 15 years previously. During that time I was exposed to: Drupal, WordPress, home grown Cold Fusion CMS I built in the 90's (may it rest in piece), Ning, Tumblr, TownNEWS Bloxx CMS, the very expensive platform Clickability and Blogger.

I am in agreement with Ryan that WordPress is probably the simplest and easiest to get up and running quickly. Just set this up in 2 weeks: http://community.steripen.com

If all you need is to post content: text, images & video with some social media push capabilities, then you can be in business very quickly.

I loved Drupal but had a very difficult time getting it implemented live as customizations were time consuming/complicated (for me anyways) and outsourcing quality Drupal help was expensive. It's great for community building but might be overkill for blogging. Acquia has some great use-case builds that you might find useful to check out if you need more than basic blogging. Basically from a programming perspective it was over my head. That is just as much my limitation as the product. I also didn't find the blogging tools to be very robust. As I recall it required a lot of plugins to do some of the most basic things that wordpress does out of the box.

Three years ago I walked into a job where there were 5 Joomla installs pumping content for 1 newspaper in Utah. It was a nightmare for me. Joomla seemed like a big step backwards. to some degree though, these products have unique feature sets that are geared towards certain product dev groups so this is a very opinionated discussion for sure. By the time I left we had moved off Joomla to something called TownNews  Bloxx CMS which is overkill for you.

As I recently learned, be careful about setting up a new blog. All best practices here at SeoMoZ point to keeping your blog in a subfolder of your main site. Due to limitations of my cms, I wasn't able to do that short term.

[PeterAlexLeigh]

Thanks Tim. Rather you than me with your Cold Fusion solution!

We've got several blogs running by themselves and embedded in other sites at the moment, but they're all done on word-press for convenience and time.

I suppose I'm looking for something that combines functionality with speed and generally good SEO functionality and tools. I think Drupal a bit heavy for our requirements, but I'm getting the sense from you also that Wordpress is still the way forward, so I'm happy with that.

[BTeubner]

Wordpress

[BTeubner]

Wordpress

[Web-Designer-Dubai]

Wordpress is definietely a best choice considering various points"

1. Wordpress is developed mainly for blogging. Means the basic structure is designed from the blogging prospects. Gradually they build up and added features of CMS but without changing their main structure.
2. Joomla is mainly built as CMS. That is very flexible and can be used for various types of websites using extensions. So If you want to use Joomla as blogging site, you need some extra extensions.
3. Wordpress is much easier to use, specially when you are using it for blog only.
4. 100 of blogging related extensions available with Wordpress. For Example Social Sharing, Feedburner, Videos and other media handling, etc. It can be bit complex in Joomla.