Wordpress

Wordpress is the most popular blogging system for self hosted websites. It started as a blog software but has evolved to be able to handle a great deal of content with some of the largest sites out there using it as their core engine. Wordpress is Open Source meaning that it's free to use and is provided with the full source code.

Having been built originally as a blogging system items like the user friendly URLs include dates the article was published which can be nice at times, and while it may not be desired for other situations, URLs are actually rarely noticed in detail by users. Layouts are slightly more limited compared to Joomla, but don't let that make you think it's limited by any means.

This is a great choice for a system if you're running any sort of regularly updated article content, but it can also be used for a static site giving you a great platform to build on and allowing you to change the look and feel later on without losing any content. In choosing Wordpress for a system, you're able to count on a consistent and followed software with a very large community of contributors.

Features in the Wordpress core software:

Full standards compliance
Cross-blog communication tools - including Trackback and Pingback
Commenting - Users can comment on articles. This can be limited to members only or to the public, or disabled all together.
Spam protection - There are various methods included to prevent most spam on the site.
Full user registration
Password Protected Posts - You can give certain content items a password so only users with that password can view them.
User Permissions - Certain users are only allowed to post drafts while others are allowed to publish to the front end.
Typographical niceties - This replaces various symbols we use everyday in written language but also have website code functions with a web friendly and non-code invasive entity. This is done automatically so the user entering the content doesn't have to worry about it.

Wordpress has many extensions that can be added for improved and custom functionality and display of content. It's fairly rare to find a site that Wordpress can't handle if the proper pre-planning takes place.