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The way to browse it, I suppose, is not a blog-style, but it's like a small library, in which articles are not sorted by dates, by mainly by its popularity.
I thought Joomla would be great, but it seems too heavy and takes a lot of system resource. The system is not fast enough.
Do you think wordpress, a much lighter CMS, can suit my need?
Any advice is welcome. Thanks!
wordpress.org shows different non-blog websites that uses WP as CMS. Some of them are quite large and have a lot of articles.
I'm not familiar with WP. If most contents are published as "page", would it be difficult to categorize them and list them?
Some examples shown in the WP's official showcase has very complicated front page, with a lot of links to different articles.
In WP, it's possible to set a "PAGE" as a frontpage. These pages can be any HTML, but it would be a disastrous to manage so many links manually.
How do they do it?
My WordPress site has ONE post. It's the main page to the site. Posts can be written in HTML or simply typed in a box in the admin panel. If I need to change the main page, I simply edit the one post I have. I set up WordPress to remove things like allowing comments, etc., so it looks like a normal page.
I also have two other types of pages in the WordPress site. One category is "links", which can be any other page or website anywhere. In standard WordPress jargon, these are called the "Blogroll," but it's easy to change the name to "Links" or to anything else you want.
The second category is "Pages." The main difference between a link and page is that a page has the same CSS as the main page of the site (in other words, it looks the same). You can also change the name of this category if you want.
Both "Pages" and "Links" can be accessed from a navigation menu, usually to one side or the other of the main post, but the location can be almost anywhere on the page you want. You can have as many "Pages" or "Links" as you want and you can also set up sub-Pages if you wish.
This could all have been done in HTML or in any other common web language, but the advantage of using WordPress was that it was much faster to set things up, especially if you find a WordPress template with a look you like.
No database, no security concerns, no script updates, etc. That's simple IMHO :-) My most profitable small site has 120 pages and it's straight HTML, no CMS, no software of any kind. Makes me some good cash without the administrative headache.
I've been working with WP and a certain theme that when combined with a bit of programming knowledge can easily compete with any so called "professional" off-the-shelf CMS out there - Drupal and Joomla included.
I've worked with a number of CMSs over the years and I refused to commit to using anyone of them (in effect endorsing them) because I never felt comfortable with ANY of them. I preferred to label myself as a JackOfAllTrades rather than a MasterOfOne. But I've watched most of the top CMS communities come and go, grow and die (WP, Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, etc..). Over the 10 years that I've been watching only one has really stood out and met my criteria:
1) Excellent performance
2) Excellent community support
3) Loads of options and extensibility
4) Speed
5) Flexible/customizable
6) Intuitive GUI
and ... bonus
7) unique out-of-the-box people thinking about how to make the product better
IMHO some of the brightest people are involved in the WordPress community. I think the product is severely undervalued simply because it started as a blogging platform which is why I've decided to build many of my client sites with it as of late. It can be so much more than what people perceive.
