Bloggers, what do you use

So I am thinking of making a Blog, I've managed to stay out of Blogging for all these years but it is catching up with me.


What software do you use? I don't really have time to write my own CMS, nor do I think I am proficient enough anymore to make one to the caliber that is seen as standard.


What I envision.


Front page with a title header, and 4 or 5 Navigation buttons in the header.
Left side bar that has expandable/collapsible navigation links

Body of the main page being "news" "Blog"
Blog post being mirrored into a PHPBB forum for comments made with in forum



thoughts on CMS tools that could help me make this a reality, comments on the idea of forum integration, ya/na?

Blogger is the easiest to use if you want stock or slightly tweaked. You can do most of the things you envision but you'll need to code some. There's plenty of sites that have the help with that though, like this one:

http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/

The stock templates are not that great though. Here's an example of a slightly tweaked template:

http://www.raingem.com/

The TypePad seems to have much more templates available. If you want to invest some time coding, it's probably a better choice. Not as user-friendly as Blogger but less limiting.

Don't know much about LiveJournal, sry.

Wordpress should do it (may have more than you need, really), but there are pre-existing extensions to integrate it with a phpBB forum.

http://www.fahlstad.se/wp-plugins/wp-forum/ - phpBB3 integration (would require some changes, apparently some MySQL queries aren't safely escaped)
http://www.stuff.yellowswordfish.com/simplepress-forum/ - "self contained" forum plugin