Engine for a Blog

When I started a blog, I had to decide how and where to run it. Despite predictions that blogs would quickly lose popularity, they stayed afloat-hello from 2015, that is exactly how it turned out. They even became the most popular type of web page. More and more people want to express their thoughts, share them with others, and give their creativity an outlet.

So what should you choose?
There are convenient services such as LiveJournal, Blogspot, and Tumblr, along with countless other communities, specialised or otherwise, that offer this opportunity. These blogging platforms make it quick and easy to create a blog that is simple and intuitive to manage.

Look at it from the other side, however, and things are less pleasant. Dependence on a platform limits your creative freedom in design and unconventional blog concepts, and it is unpleasant to realise that the blog is not entirely yours. Some platforms offer almost complete freedom, but it is an illusion unless you follow a few rules:

Rules you must follow:
1. Your own domain: if the platform cannot host your blog for any reason, you keep the name.
2. Regular backups of the content somewhere independent of the platform: if it can no longer host the blog, you can restart it on another platform or your own engine.
3. Design backups: keep all the latest design changes somewhere independent of the platform.
4. Backups of every multimedia file.
5. A backup of the URL hierarchy.

Rules that are advisable to follow:
1. Republish posts through as many channels as possible: Facebook, VKontakte, Twitter, and others. This reduces the risk of losing content.
2. Create a mirror of your blog on the same platform under a different account. It will be useful if your main account is blocked for alleged spam or some other reason.
3. Keep a local copy of the blog; you can create one with the wonderful utility wget.

Personally, I concluded-another hello from 2015-that a self-hosted platform is much more attractive. Such platforms give authors complete freedom over functionality, design, and their creative impulses. There are countless options, but to avoid overwhelming you, I will discuss only those I consider the most popular and the best.

WordPress - the undisputed leader: the most convenient and popular, the simplest and at the same time the most developed blogging engine. It has an enormous range of plugins, extensions, updates, and other useful things.

WordPress owes much of its popularity to its straightforward installer. A manual installation requires a database and its connection details. You can fill in wp-config.php yourself or let the installer create it. There are also many official Russian-language resources devoted to WordPress. As for settings, there are a huge number of them.

There are countless themes, or ready-made designs, for this engine: upload one to the themes directory and your site has a new design. There are also many plugins, which, like themes, can be installed directly from the administration panel.

Another very important point is that WordPress is not just for blogs. It can power other kinds of sites, from corporate portals and online shops to landing pages and placeholders.

But nothing is perfect. Popularity attracts not only users but malicious hackers, for whom such a widespread engine offers a chance to add more machines to their botnets. Vulnerabilities can affect WordPress itself, themes or plugins. Keeping up with updates, access permissions and backups matters; the time needed to release a fix varies.

Drupal - another well-known CMS that can be used for blogging. Installation is not quite as simple, though it is hardly difficult: essentially, it installs like a conventional CMS. I will not explain each step; if you do not know how, the installation manual is clear enough to read.

This system has a complex tree-like publishing structure that not every beginner will understand. It is also worth mentioning that the engine can serve not only as a blog but as a site with virtually any functionality, depending on the modules you enable.

It is certainly not a beginner's choice: even an experienced webmaster will not immediately find their way around all its functions and settings. If you want simple solutions, this is not your option. Drupal's templating system is not especially obvious, either.

Its clear advantage is extensibility. You can build almost anything you want with Drupal. It is not quite a CMS so much as a framework with a graphical interface.

A few more options:

Textpattern - this engine is little known in the Russian-speaking web, but its implementation and underlying ideas are quite original. Free ready-made themes are available. Installation depends on the version; older versions often required manual work to import templates and adjust the design. Its major advantage is its own tag system, useful for people who want to customise a design without learning PHP. You only need to understand a few dozen tags. Otherwise, it is a conventional blogging engine that is quite convenient for beginners.

B2evolution - a project related to WordPress, which could be described as an alternative to WordPress MU because it also supports multiple blogs. In other words, you can run several blogs at once. Overall, it is a pretty good engine, but there is no browser-based theme editor, so you have to edit everything by hand and upload it to the server. One noteworthy feature is the built-in statistics package: it provides comprehensive information without requiring anything extra.

MovableType - the first thing you notice is that this engine is written in Perl. This less widespread language is at home on Linux systems. Setup is also quite involved unless you use Linux: you have to make files executable, change permissions, edit .htaccess, and do much more. In short, it is not for Windows users-or at least not for every Windows user. In terms of functionality, it is one of the best engines. It also has its own tag system for customising designs. Another significant feature is the ability to run an unlimited number of blogs from a single installation.