use a blog system for site news?

[stuartc1]

Hi Folks,

I've been running some old poor quality new system on my site for a couple of years now... it creates RSS feeds, but the admin section is extremely poor quality.

I've been thinking of changing this to some blog software - and looking for some opinions.

Are there any decent blog systems out there which are easy enough to edit so I can keep my current site layout.. i.e. I dont want all those menus, calendars down the side - I'll just run the RSS on the homepage and be able to link it to the news item (whic his held in my current site). I use includes for headers and footers..

Any suggestions?

Cheers

[anax]

I recently started to use WordPress for this purpose. It can be completely customized to match a pre-existing site format (most of the customizing involves ripping out lots of default stuff you don't want). It takes quite a bit of work, but is certainly posible.

[softwareengineer99]

I have had very pleasant experiences with Nucleus and Drupal, but with a few tweaks.

[bill]

I've done this with MovableType. It's quite well documented and has great support. The selling point for me was that it can output static pages (it can also handle dynamic) into an exact replica of my site's templates. All I had to do was figure out where to paste the MT tags and my news site was up and running.

[graeme_p]

I found Wordpress easy to customise as well.

There have been explantions on the Wordpress forums of how to show Wordpress posts on non-Wordpress pages - so you can do things like still show the latest news titles on your front page.

You might also want to look at Bloxsom as it is very light weight. I have not tried it myself though.