Forum Moderators: phranque
Anyone have any suggestions?
Search wikpedia for weblog software and you will get a long list. Look for easy templating when you are evaluating them.
Personally, I have blogs for my websites on a blogsite and simply link to them from the main pages. Works very easily, and you're even allowed to host adsense on the blog.
Now, most CMSs are god-awful hard to learn, complicated, and restricting. (Pretty strange for somethign that is supposed to be easy to learn, simple, and flexible... but that's the current state of affairs.)
All CMSs have a blogging function, plus many others. (Most of them, in fact, make it awfully hard to escape from blogdom...)
I've been investingating CMSs for a site that I am building, and I came across one that I think would be great for bloggers. It doesn't suit my needs for my particular site, but if I were doing a blog site, I think this is what I would use.
It's TextPattern.
Of the CMSs that I have installed for testing (Joomla, Drupal, TYPO3, Plone, ModX) it is the ONLY one that has an intuitive user interface that I could immediately start using to add content.
With most of the others, you first have to do an easter-egg hunt just to figure out how to add content. Oh, in some cases, you first have to figure out what their term for "content" is! Then, another easter-egg hunt just to figure out how to make it appear on the home page!
TextPattern is quite compact (only 260K for the gzipped tarball), and installs pretty easily (it does require a MySQL database, though, and you do have to know enough MySQL to first create a user and database for it to use.)
It comes with a bit of sample content, and a (very simple) sample template, so that you can get oriented.
It seems as if it was designed for bloggers. I think there's a bit of dry wit in their teaser on their website:
What is it?A free, flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites, even weblogs.
I guess first I should figure out if it's a forum I'm looking for or a blog. Basically, I'm setting this up for someone who would like a section on their site where anyone can go and start a new topic, comment on a topic. There would be an admin who would also start new topics and make edits when/if they are needed. Would this be a blog or a forumn? Can either work?
I still think a simple CMS may work out best. They support BOTH blogs AND forums, as well as other content types, so you can experiment with each. And they generally have a rich environment for controlling user privileges.
As I said earlier, CMS software can be daunting to set-up and learn, but I think TextPattern looks pretty easy to deal with and fits well into a blog format. Of the CMS packages I've reviewed, it's the only one that I think you could be up and running with in a day with no previous exposure.
I just need a very very basic forum. Something where anyone can post topics and reply to messages. Noone would need to register first. Maybe a simple "type the numbers you see in the picture" to keep spammers off. There would need to be one admin account to edit posts. The most important thing would be to have this forum hosted within the existing site using the same template as the rest of the site - so that it looks just live every other page on the site.
If anyone knows anyone who would be willing to work with me to set something like this up, please let me know. I would pay of course.
