Right now, there is no robust and feature rich blog extension for Joomla that will fufill the core features that is needed in a blog, and does it as a native (not a port) extension. Until something has been developed to fill this need, wannabe bloggers are probably much better off building a blog out of its consituant parts. Its a little more work, but the solution is more robust and easier to manage.
There are many places on the web where you can create a blog, some are free and some are paid services. To name a few:
* Blogger
* Typepad
* Wordpress
* Moveable Type
The 800 lb gorilla in the room here is Blogger. Part of the Google world, it by far hosts the most blogs. This is probably because it is very very easy to set up and free. A quick look at some Alexa rankings (rough estimate of traffic) show this picture.
So why would we want to use a content management system to blog with? Isn't there already much easy solutions?
Well, first off, this is a book about Joomla, not Blogger, so I want to try and show how you can use Joomla to blog, sell products, build community sites, make your coffee, etc etc. But there is a real reason too.
Blogs are closed systems.
What I mean by that is the software that powered alot of these blogs is basic. That's perhaps part of Blogger's huge popularity. But if a moment should come that you want to extend the features of your blog, you are stuck. Maybe you want to add a forum, or a shopping cart for your ebook, or a subscription part of your blog. Try to add any major functionality to it and you are stuck.
A big theme of this book is being very excited about how amazingly extendable Joomla is. With that in mind, if we can have Joomla mimic the basic functions of a blog, then that can be a basic foundation for all you bloggers out there to build a super sticky blog site.
More details, more information go here, http://www.joomlashack.com/index.php?op ... &Itemid=16
