Blogging Software - Wordpress vs BlogEngine.NET vs Anything else [closed]

Question

Basically I need to choose one so that, I can get familiar with it quickly and then customize it to my needs.

I'm a .NET developer and know classic ASP too. But I think understanding PHP will not be a problem for me and also think that it won't be that difficult.

What will you like to recommend me?

UPDATE:-
Sorry that I'm adding this info late. Right now I don't know what customization I will be doing. But I'm sure going forward I will have my own requirement and will need to customize. So I don't want to be in situation where I will have to say "This engine which I'm using will not allow me XYZ change or it will be too difficult for me to make XYZ change in this blogging software, so lets migrate to something else."

I will prefer a short learning curve.

Swing

Wordpress is the most popular I presume. – Ruralize

Thanks! But I'm looking for the easiest to customize not the most popular. – Swing

I think you'll probably find it easiest to customise as well. And there's a lot of support out there. – Spume

Answer 1

Go with Wordpress. It's easily customisable, and there's masses and masses of information on customising it.

• Digging into Wordpress
• Wordpress docs
• Thematic - a Wordpress theme designed to be easily customisable/extensible.

Spume

Answer 2

If you know .NET and C#, facing PHP and mySql is going to feel like you went back to 19th century and have to burn coal in your "car" instead of tanking your beamer at a local gas station :-)

One particularly interesting thing about BlogEngine.NET is that out of the box it will run without SQL Server - just with XML files as a storage. If you know your programming I don't have to tell you what kind of flexibility that provides. Not that I'd recommend actually running a web site for a long time without SQL Server but such dual backing opens some very interesting options.

Should I mention that it comes with Visual Studio sln and proj files? :-) That pretty much means zero learning curve.

Waxbill

If you know .NET and C#, facing PHP and mySql is going to feel like you went back to 19th century and have to burn coal in your "car" instead of tanking your beamer at a local gas station :-). I agree on this. I've a similar previous experience. But according to @Benjamin's answer Wordpress customization isn't so much PHP development, as it is Wordpress development, since you'll be so deep in Wordpress' own world and API. And yes it's also right that I will have a familiar dev environment. – Swing

Every API has to be caled from some actual code, and when anything starts breaking you have to know at least one layer bellow just to be able to debug. Never happened that it hasn't happened :-) – Waxbill

Answer 3

Wordpress is nice, but if you're a .NET developer BlogEngine.NET is extremely easy to extend. The drawback is the much smaller community and resources, but if you're wanting to do some real customization and tweaking, BlogEngine will probably fit your tastes much better. There is a decent development community backing and supporting customization and plugins for BlogEngine, but you'll find that a lot of the information is outdated or maintenance has been forgotten.

If you're wanting something with tons of community widgets, plug-ins and tons of themes, Wordpress is your prime choice without a question. But that's if you're going with the canned solutions. There are a lot of them, and you can still customize them and tweak things, but that's dependent on how comfortable you feel about picking up a new paradigm. Wordpress customization isn't so much PHP development, as it is Wordpress development, since you'll be so deep in Wordpress' own world and API.

Both are available in MS's Web Platform Installer, check them out of your box and play around with them some. It's really going to come down to which one you feel just fits. I've used both for different projects, but I've fallen back on doing my own thing with BlogEngine more than Wordpress. But that's for my own personal stuff.

Melville

Thanks! It was nice piece of advice. But now I'm even more confused as both thing has its on pros and cons. Can you please tell me how much is the learning curve in WordPress and BlogEngine.NET or which one has a short learning curve? – Swing

The both have about the same learning curve, but you'll find more accurate and up-to-date resources for WP. – Melville

If I go for WordPress now, can I migrate back my post to BlogEngine.NET and vice versa? This is what I actually I don't want to do and because of which I'm taking everyones opinion here. But I still want to keep that option open so that I don't get stuck. – Swing

BlogEngine has a import feature, that uses the RSS feed of a blog, but I've never used it and last time I looked at it, it was still in Beta. I seriously doubt there is a Blogengine importer for Wordpress though, since it's community is significantly smaller and has more of a niche group. Though you could probably find an rss importer that would work similar to the one within blogengine.net. If you use SQL express for your storage, instead of the file system based XML storage, it would be significantly easier to create an importer for Wordpress by just mapping the fields into the Mysql DB. – Melville