I'm interested in setting up my own blog site and have toyed with a couple of offerings but I figure someone out there might have some sage advice on what best meets my (humble) needs..
Initially I'd like to test the software on my own system which is Win32 running Apache2, PHP 4.3.8 and MySQL. I'd ideally like to have my musings etc stored on a dbase and some measure of control over security and look-n-feel stuff. Something that makes use of CSS but not necessarily all singing all dancing..just a calendar, a place to write entries, maybe a sidebar with some links to favourite sites/other blogs I browse and that's about it - oh, and maybe room for reader comments too!
And all this in an open source offering preferrably. Asking too much? Any feedback, sugegstions gratefully received.

Well, I'm not a blogger but I'm fan of a chilean blog wich uses Movable Type. It looks pretty fine. If you can read in spanish please visit Francotirador at http://www.argonave.com/francotirador

More posts about your questions you can find in the topic which CMS is the BEST? started by honeycomb

Oops! I'm showing my age - I thought CMS stood for Customer Management System so I didn't even read that post .

Thanks for the heads up - have now read Honeycombs responses and back in the hunt. Cheers!

I used to have a website blog. I used regular html and all that fun stuff, and just used HaloScan (haloscan.com) for my commenting.

Oh yes, here's a website I found helpful for finding these services.

http://geekphilosopher.com/MainPage/blogLinksTools.htm

There's a part about open source, hehe.

I like wordpress. good community, good features, easy setup.

When you get astahost space, use Wordpress which is in the preinstalled scripts --> addon scripts. It is good.

make your own blog-script! haha! learn php and do it yourself. you'll have more freedom about the layout and stuff.

Movable Type is by far the suprior blogging tool on Earth (in my opinion), and i think it does fits all your requirements.

System requirements: MT runs on PHP and mySQL, so it's should be OK for you.

Security: Although the basic MT package itself is quite lacking in protection against comment and trackback spam, there are many who have written plugins for MT. Some of these plugins include protection against comment spammers.

Look-n-feel stuff: MT is template driven. Just change the templates, the CSS styles, and you can change the appearance of your blog easily. No need to update every single page.

Calendar, a place to write entries, sidebar, reader comments: all included functions in MT. In fact you can just use any of the templates that come with MT, they have all you need

Download MT for free: http://www.movabletype.org

best cms blog is www.b2evolution.net

Yes, I agree with ijcguy. Wordpress is a good blog engine for quick starting / personal blogging but movable type is the best. However installing movable type on your own computer running windows xp is difficult. You can install wordpress on your own machine easily with just 3 or 4 clicks.

This post has been edited by hikmet: Feb 4 2007, 02:02 PM