I’ve been playing around with a few blog engines over the past few months, trying to decide which one to use for my own blog. I’ve been spurred on by my sister-in-law Ruth, who has just started her own blog.

Blogger is one of the best – it is free, and can be deployed as a hosted (on blogspot.com) or ftp’d to my (own site. Nice UI too. I gave it 7/10.

TypePad is a hosted version of MovableType. It is highly flexible, but can only be used as a paid for hosted service. That means that I can’t integrate it closely with my site, using the same CSS and templates. 5/10

MovableType would provide a version on my own hosting service, but the free version (it is not truly Open Source, but a commercial offering by Six Apart) has some significant limitations. Only 4/10.

I therefore chose to use WordPress, a standards-compliant, flexible publishing system, based on PHP and MySQL. The documentation is excellent. A clear 8/10.

I’m still trying to get the system set up correctly, particularly to integrate the look and feel in with the rest of my site, so bear with me over the next few weeks as I get it sorted out.

If you’re interested, some further discussion on the relative merits of blogging engines can be found at unbounded.org.
Chris Davis has some good tutorials on integrating WordPress with existing PHP-based sites.