SubJeff on 26/6/2012 at 08:31
So I installed Wordpress the other day (previously I've coded my sites in their entirety) .
It's just not as flexible as I'd been lead to believe and getting it to do what I want is a little bit of a headache.
So I'm looking for an alternative. In many ways the templating on Blogger is better but I want a system installed on my domain. The whole reason for this is so I can edit my site from anywhere in the world easily. Not everyone/everywhere has the FTP and code editors I need.
Any ideas?
SubJeff on 26/6/2012 at 14:18
Someone suggested I use SSH to update my HTML. I can't seem to find anything else out about it. Any ideas?
Al_B on 26/6/2012 at 18:22
Seems confusing advice to me. SSH is an encrypted shell connection that can also support file transfers via a shell mode known as SFTP. Unless they were suggesting that the use of FTP is potentially insecure so you should switch to something with more protection I'm not sure what they were saying.
(Although, of course, given the limited amount of available acronyms "SSH" may, in fact, be a wonderful CMS system).
As to your original question, the only public one that I've had a lot of experience with is (
http://www.joomla.org/) Joomla!. It's certainly flexible - loads of extensions are out there for it and if you're masochistic enough you can write your own. If you're only wanting to slightly spice-up your blog it might be more heavyweight than you're looking for.
SubJeff on 4/7/2012 at 17:34
I've been playing with Wordpress and it's not as flexible as I'd like. Not unless I write my own template anyway, and man is that a drag.
What I want is a standard site, header (menu in/under the header), content, footer with an index/homepage.
Then I need one page which has a sub-menu for flicking through some pages, though I don't actually need new pages because I'm using a form script for the navigation of this bit.
I need another page with panels on it, a directory of sorts. Each panel links to an item page. Ideally I'd like to have comments possible on the item pages and for the directory to be searchable.
It's pretty simple and at the moment I'm hand coding it, needing FTP, no comments, no searches. With blog software the comments and searches via page tagging would be possible. It's the layout that's the problem via Wordpress.
Sitemap
Home - links to:
- Feature page - has other "pages" that are navigated to with form script changing style.display to block or none.
- Directory page, panelled - links to item pages that I'd like to be able to add/alter
- Contact page - natch
That's it. So hard :(
Yakoob on 5/7/2012 at 17:42
Well, WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are the holy trinity of PHP CMSes, going from least-technical-least-powerful to most-technical-most-powerful in that order
* WordPress - the easiest but, with so many plugins, also the most flexible. I do recommend it; look around for plugins or even custom theming if you need to extend its basic flexibility. You'd be amazed what can be done with a "blogging" platform
* Joomla - have a client who was already set up with 1.5 and 1.7 and absolutely HATE IT. Imho it's structure has too much ambiguous distrinctions (modules vs. components vs. featues vs. themes vs... aww fuck it), sometimes very unintuitive interface, and quite buggy (I need to keep re-pasting pure HTML code into articles since the WYSIWYG editor keeps messing it up every time, sometimes objects wont appear even if they are set up properly etc.)
* Drupal - requires A LOT of tinkering and digging / setting up, but once you get the grove of things you will be amazed how much you can accomplish without writing a single line of code. I create an FML/TextFromLastNight type website in just two days from scratch, based on exisitng modules alone.
However, I hear performance isn't its forte, and bigger sites become a bit of a jumbled mess of 30+ modules. I am afraid of even updating a single one in case it breaks everything. Also backing/migrating the site is a bit of a pain with so many variables to keep track of.
My 53 cents.
EDIT: I just read your post SubjEff, and it looks like Drupal, with "Views", "Panels" and some custom-defined object types (for the items) would be perfect, and it comes with user-management and comments by default. You can integrate product ratings and social media pretty easily via additional modules as well. Like I said, it may seem steep at first if you never used it, but you can get it all up and running really fast WITHOUT any coding.
Alternatively, you can hire a web developer to get it up and running, (
http://www.jakeski.com) like myself :D
SubJeff on 5/7/2012 at 19:56
Thanks Yakoob, I'll give Drupal a go.
I'd hire a developer but truth is I code myself. I'm not anywhere near your level but I code enough for a simple site. HTML/JavaScript/CSS is my core, but I do a bit of PHP and SQL too.
Chimpy Chompy on 5/7/2012 at 23:35
Following this thread with some interest as I'd like to spruce up my own site (see profile if you care).
The original was bashed together 7 odd years ago after reading a php-for-dummies book, and could do with modernising, especially the clunky cms behind the scenes. Not sure if it would be better for a revamp to again be hand-coded. Or if I should just junk it and grab a ready-made CMS off the shelf.
Guess I'll see what wordpress can do, first, if that's the easiest.
Al_B on 6/7/2012 at 00:26
Wordpress will probably do what you need. Based on your current website you'll want to obviously tweak / change the current template but it's probably due a refresh anyway.
Drupal... I couldn't quite come to terms with. It's definitely a great CMS but for serious work you seem to keep banging your head against a brick wall and needing
yet another plugin. Modularity is great, but I kept feeling that anything I did introduced as many problems as it solved.
I haven't tried the latest version but Joomla by comparison is horribly structured but if you can pare it down to your needs it actually works quite well. You don't have to put up with the default editors (
https://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/edition/editors/88) JCE, for example, is not perfect but it makes editing a lot easier.
Given what you've said, I think you'll be best with wordpress and if you're happy with HTML / CSS / PHP as you say then generating a containing structure shouldn't be too tricky.
SubJeff on 6/7/2012 at 00:41
Well I'll be tinkering with Drupal so I'll let you know what I think compared to WP.
jay pettitt on 6/7/2012 at 14:48
Drupal is a CMS construction kit - you get to build your own behind the scenes out of building blocks and then build your own database structures and eventually a shiny website. There are some advantages to that approach (especially if you're building a site for someone else and have specific criteria for the CMS that you need to meet), but if you want a fairly standard website in double quick time Drupal might be overkill and overly hard work. It's awesome. But it's also a lifestyle choice.
Mostly though, I think the thing to do is pick one and stick at it. Wordpress is pretty much a easy to get going with blog template engine out the box, but can be pushed into all sorts of other things with a little effort.
Possibly worth considering is Textpattern. It's showing it's age in terms how the behind the scenes screens look, but it's pretty flexible and has one great advantage over the big guns of the CMS world. It's not a magnet for comment spam - that means you can be super lovely to your readers and not make them take an eyetest exam every time they want to comment and also not have to spend your free time fending off crappy adverts for loans. That's a serious plus in my book.
The disadvantage with TextPattern is that it's not used so much, so the skills you learn won't be as useful or transferable to other sites as they might be if you learned say Wordpress or Drupal.
