Why it comes to blogging, there is an abundance of software platforms to choose from. This is one of the first decisions that a blogger who wants to run his own site must make. To make this decision, I have extensively researched many of the currently popular platforms. All the platforms described below require MyPHP, MySQL and the Apache on your server to work.
WordPress
WordPress is the most popular platform today. It is open-source and available for free. It is probably the easiest platform for the non-technical blogger to pick up, and is renowned for its ease of installation. Because of its popularity, there is an enormous amount of documentation on the web which should help you solve any problem you encounter. WordPress is also designed to accept plugins and widgets which extends its capabilities, and there are a LOT of plugins available. In addition, WordPress also accepts themes, which are basically web design templates which can be applied to your content, instantly changing the way your website looks. There are many freely available themes on the web that you can download and try out. WordPress also generates XHTML compliant HTML code, and search engine friendly permalinks. The main drawback of WordPress is that it is designed to run only one blog. Running multiple blogs require an entire new installation of WordPress for each blog, as well as a new MySQL database, which may present a problem if your web host limits the number of databases you can create. Another more minor problem is that the default WYSISYG editor that comes with WordPress leaves much to be desired. However, there are plenty of excellent third-party editors.
Movable Type
Movable Type is a commercial blogging platform by Six Apart. It once had over 90% of the blogger market, but has since been wildly eclipsed in terms of user base by WordPress. In 2007, Movable Type was open-sourced and is now available free, but only for personal use. For commercial/education/non-profit use, you need to buy a license. In terms of functionality, it is very similar to WordPress. However, Movable Type has fewer plugins and themes than WordPress, and documentation on the web is also much less. The key advantage that Movable Type has over WordPress is that it is able to run multiple blogs off a single installation. In the end, for a single blog, I preferred the more widely supported WordPress over Movable Type, although it is a more difficult choice if you are running more than one blog. Also, I may one day decide to turn my blog commercial, and the terms of the Movable Type license may prohibit this.
ExpressionEngine
EE is another commercial blogging platform which is supposed to have a richer feature set than WordPress or MT. However, I would never know this, since EE is NOT open source and only the basic “ExpressionEngine Core” version is freely downloadable. The full version costs money. The deal killer is that the free version of EE prohibits any advertising on your blog.
B2evolution
A close cousin of WordPress (they are derived from the same parent code), b2evolution is also open source and free. B2evolution also supports skins, which works basically the same way that themes work for WordPress. Unfortunately, there are far fewer plugins and skins availabel for b2evolution compared to WordPress. On the many forums I visited, it seems that many b2evolution users eventually abandon it for WordPress because of the greater diversity of plugins and themes. The main advantage of b2evolution over WordPress is that it supports multi-blogging.
Joomla
Technically, Joomla is a Content Management System (CMS) used for many large corporate and university websites. It is actually able to do much more than WordPress, with the ability, for example, to host forums and other interactive services. Joomla is also an extensible system, with templates available for any kind of website you want to run. For example, there are templates for a restaurant website, a forum, or a calendar. With this power comes a steeper learning curve. Joomla definitely requires a deeper knowledge of HTML code compared to the above-mentioned blogging platforms. While there are several blogging templates for Joomla, it seems that most bloggers abandon Joomla in the end for another more specialized blogging platform, because there simply isn’t much support for the blogging among the Joomla community. If you just want to write a blog, and do not want to do stuff like host a forum or a web store, then you will probably get more done in a shorter time if you stick with a specialized blogging platform instead of a CMS.
Drupal
Another CMS platform, Drupal is actually more powerful than even Joomla, but is also more difficult to learn. Joomla has a larger user base and more modules than Drupal. For stuff like event calendars, shopping carts, forums and multimedia, Joomla has more modules and is better than Drupal. The creators of Drupal are more programming-oriented, and Drupal produces cleaner HTML code and is much more SEO friendly than Joomla. For blogging, if you must go for a full-fledged CMS, I recommend Drupal over Joomla because Drupal produces search engine-friendly links out of the box, and generally produces better code which is more friendly to search engines. A key advantage of Drupal over Joomla is its ability to host more than one website at once, while a separate installation of Joomla is required for each website.
Final decision
I finally decided to go with WordPress. If you just want to run a single blog, WordPress is a no brainer. It has a user base that is probably 2-3 times that of the nearest competitor, so support is just so much better. If you want to run a few blogs, then WordPress is still the answer. If you want to run 40 blogs, then you may want to look into a true mutli-blog system. One option is WordPress Multi-User (WPMU), the much less well-supported version of WordPress which natively runs multiple blogs. Of course, there are also Movable Type and b2evolution. In general, I find the CMS platforms too cumbersome for just running a blog.