What is a good way to integrate blog functionality into a website not using WordPress?

I was building a simple website for a friend, and he wants to add a blog to his site.

I wasn't sure what approach to take.

Specifically I don't want to alter the look of the existing website and just want a different section for his blog.

A light CMS option would be great as it would make it easy for him to add content and possibly search, but something I could style using simple CSS.

I was looking at WordPress as an option, but it seems pretty bloated and hard to theme.

Not that I don't think WP is capable - I am considering it, but I was looking towards trying some other CMS' and any other approaches that you might recommend.

Thanks

I'm afraid I'm a WordPresser myself, so I can't offer non-WP advice. But if your main concern is that WordPress is hard to theme, then you could have your own pages integrate with it and handle the display in your own code?

If you're on a PHP-platform integration can be done in 5-10 lines of code, as shown [on the WordPress Codex pages][1]. If you're on another technology stack, you could either use [the XML-RPC API][2] or have WordPress publish full RSS feeds and use those to create pages in your friend's site?

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Are you currently using any CMS in order for your friend to be able to edit the site? While you mention that Wordpress seems bloated to you, a lot of the codebase is looking after creating posts, editing, versioning, etc.

Without a CMS to back the blog, this will be something that you'll have to write from scratch. Additionally, while lighter tools like [CushyCMS][1] can be good for editing static sites, if you're friend is blogging, he will need some way to add new pages/posts, rather than just editing existing ones.

I would suggest re-evaluating Wordpress — as CMS go, it's a small learning curve, both for you and for him, and it's possible to strip it right back, so that the only HTML/CSS outputted is what you write yourself.

Check out [Roots][2] theme as an option — based on Twitter Bootstrap & HTML 5 boilerplate — or if you prefer, check out some tutorials on coding a theme from scratch. It's surprisingly quick to get going & you have complete control over the outputted HTML/CSS.


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You can try also [Microweber CMS][1]. They support blog and shop and it is downloadable - open source.


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