New Site need Suggestions: CMS, Blog or?

CMS, Blog or something else?

[danidarling]

Howdy!

I was hoping for some suggestions. I have been asked to build a new site for a county recreation facility. They want to be able to:

1. Be able to have several people make changes to the site (10), like schedules and rain outs and other typical stuff.

That's really their only request. I think that it would be really nice if they could have a RSS feed for the rain outs and changes, in addition to having everything on the site. It would be nice if things could be put on a calendar day and go out on the feed when it was time, but also any imediate posts go out ASAP, like the game is cancelled.

But then I wonder if one blog would even be enough. They have several sports going at once and maybe the tennis people don't care about baseball and vice versa. So maybe a CMS? Could I have one with several different calendars and feeds? And that was easy enough for a bunch of old fogeys to use (only kidding).

Which brings me to another?, I have noticed an amazing difference in the delivery time with the different feeds that I have set up. Do you have a recommendation on a good reliably quick feed service that I can recommend? My feedburner one seems pretty quick, but my yahoo never even shows up and my Thunderbird one only comes once every 24 hrs.

Open source is best--no budget to speak of.

Thanks a bunch!

Danielle

[jtara]

I would use a CMS, as it gives you much greater layout flexibility than a blog. You also will have access to a large number of "modules" or "plugins". You can almost certainly find a number of modules for displaying schedules, for example.

Yes, a CMS would let you have multiple calendars, multiple feeds, etc.

You do not need a "feed service". Most CMSs and blogging software have the ability to publish RSS. Your users can access the RSS feed using an RSS reader or RSS-enabled browser (such as Firefox), and then THEY control the update interval. Some feed services can deliver feeds via email, but that is really missing the point of RSS, I think. I'm not sure why every time some new concept comes up on the Internet, somebody wants to overlay it on email...

The main use of a "feed service" for a website is in order to get greater exposure. You don't need to get greater exposure - your site is for a specific group of users. The main use of a "feed service", for the feed service, of course, is to gain access to your content so that they can slip ads in the feed. Why give away your content, which nobody outside your users is interested in anyway?

Oh, maybe I misunderstood what you meant by "feed service". I guess you are asking what should you recommend as an RSS reader? Well, there's part of your answer above - I don't particularly like hosted feed services or email aggregators - personally, I prefer standalone readers. I use FeedDemon myself.

I haven't used Thunderbird (it's a email client - what's it doing with a feed reader?) nor the RSS capability of Firefox, but I assume they both are configurable as to update frequency. The feed itself specifies a minimum update frequency. Most feed readers will automatically use the frequency suggested by the website, but allow you to override that. So, before you pass judgement on a particular reader, see what the default update frequency is for the site, and see what options you have in the feed reader for controlling update frequency.

[danidarling]

Thanks,

You wouldn't happen to have a dummy friendly CMS to recommend? I've been to opencms.org or whatever it is--there are SOOO Many!

Really I have no clue about the feeds and appreciate your info. I only started playing with them when I started my latest website about 2 months ago.
I guess Thunderbird was trying to be closer competition to Outlook or something. I'm sure you're right about the refresh frequency settings-but I figure if I haven't found them then these users won't have-we're in rural Georgia. This community is not computer savvy.

Thanks

Danielle

[jtara]

I recently did an evaluation of several of the most popular CMSs. For overall capability and ease of use, my choice would be Drupal. There certainly is a learning curve, and it doesn't help that it doesn't come with a pre-loaded demo site. But it is so popular that there are plenty of online resources, printed books, etc.

For instant gratification, TextPattern looks good. Of all of the CMSs that I tested, it has the most intuitively obvious user interface. That is, you can go in and start creating articles immediately.

Ironically, TextPattern is a bit more difficult to install than some other CMSs, as there isn't an Installatron installer script available for it. (Installatron is an "automatic script installer" available on many web hosting control panels.) But you just have to follow simple and complete instructions to set it up. Also, like some other CMSs, it doesn't have any plugins pre-installed, but there are quite a large number available.

[danidarling]

Thank you very much :-)

I was just checking out Drupal again and saw a review that mentioned how easily it set up for the guy once he had a real motive, not just playing around. I'll have to look into the other one too for kicks, but I'm maybe starting to think Drupal might be it. I would have to guess that they have pretty good event calendar modules (off to explore the net).

A?--- You mentioned the installatron script. How would I know if my current host had that? I have had some trouble getting a couple of things to install, like when I played with phpnuke. It may have been a permission thing, coz I have gotten some stuff to install right. I must be forgetting some step in there ;-)

Danielle

[jtara]

Installatron works with the DirectAdmin, cPanel, or Plesk control panels. If you have one of these, you might also have Installatron. It's a completely seperate product, though, which your ISP may or may not have decided to license.