Choosing a blogging engine for your web-site

I've recently spent quite some time trying to find a good blogging engine for one web-site and wanted to share my experience.

In general there lots of different engines that allow you less of greater degree of flexibility (usually, if you don't aim for commercial use, you will have tons of features, designs etc.) and for me the most differentiative factor was the language used to power these blogs: PHP or Perl.

For those who don't know, both these languages are kinda de-facto standard in the web and the chances are high you daily use web-sites written in any of them. PHP is perhaps a bit easier and can be used to write small scripts and easy applications, while Perl is a much more like other programming languages and is more suitable for big web-sites and complicated applications. Moreover if you've ever studied C you can start programming with PHP right away while Perl will require lots of time to learn. All that's the reason I've decided to go for PHP and below are the links with a small description to the best publishing engines written in PHP:

- Joomla (http://www.joomla.org/) - perhaps the most famous one. Joomla is a great tool: it is fully written in PHP, stores data in MySQL and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization. It has thousands of plugins and is so far the most flexible platform.

- Textpattern (http://textpattern.com/) - if PHP or Perl sounds like a rocket since for you - you should go for Textpattern. I've never used it, but it looks like even monkey can tweak it and apply to its web-site (however I assume monkey knows how to use Appache)

- Drupal (http://drupal.org/) serves more like a content managing system (so it's a higher in hierarchy than ordinary blogging engine) - it is also a very flexible platform

- ExpressionEngine (http://expressionengine.com/) - nice system however it's free only in its core version and for a full-scale version you will have to pay 100USD and then some more money for other modules

- WordPress (http://wordpress.org/) - it's a closest rival to Joomla and offers same level of flexibility and thousands of add-ons. Strongly recommend.