Blog Software Or Content Management System For a website to serve as a quality article library

[Vyoma 0]

Ok. I am puting this thread here 'casue szupie told me to put it here. I like it when I can point the fingers at someone else.

 

I have been around having a Asta Host account and doing nothing with it but experimenting with PHP and MySQL. I even tried my hand at desiging a CMS, and I am pretty sure, I can get a very basic one ready. But I have got my attention diverted to various other things.

 

Anyway, as I said, I had Xisto account with 150 MB lying there, and I came across the thread made by Dhanesh: http://forums.xisto.com/topic/89067-topic/?findpost=1064340456. It that thread, Dhanesh did not know what to do with the site, but in my case, I am now pretty much focused on what I would be doing with it.

 

I have been blogging at Splat, on various topics. The issue is, all the articles there have been coming in a kind of sputter - not many coherent articles. What I intend to do with my new site is make it an article bank containing quality articles that are extensive. I intend to start of with only few topics, focusing on quality and authenticity, and then later spreading to various other topics. I may place some content targeted ads on those articles.

 

Now, I have the option of putting these articles on the website using either a Blog software or a CMS software. I followed Dhanesh's advice as in the thread indicated above, and have installed WordPress. I am quite well-versed with blog softwares as I have been doing it for the past few months.

 

But, noting that the mission of the website that I would be setting would be "to give quality articles" and I would try to earn a revenue by placing relevant ads, I wondered if I should be going for a Content Management System. Thus, I am thinking between the use of CMS and Blog (WordPress) Software.

 

Or am I thinking too much about this? Is Blogging software not a special case of CMS?

 

I would like your views regarding this.

 

If suggested for going for a CMS, I would like to know what all options I have. I would actually like the one that I can easily install using the Xisto account's CPanel's Fantastico autoinstaller.

[dhanesh1405241511 0]

Ok. I am puting this thread here 'casue szupie told me to put it here. I like it when I can point the fingers at someone else.

 

Anyway, as I said, I had Xisto account with 150 MB lying there, and I came across the thread made by Dhanesh: http://forums.xisto.com/topic/89067-topic/?findpost=1064340456. It that thread, Dhanesh did not know what to do with the site, but in my case, I am now pretty much focused on what I would be doing with it.

 

Now, I have the option of putting these articles on the website using either a Blog software or a CMS software. I followed Dhanesh's advice as in the thread indicated above, and have installed WordPress.

 

Hell yeah, u like to point the finger alrite ! .. Newayz .. seriously, i made a web blog for myself from wordpress and also applied for an adsense account (Got accepted this time) .. the reason i applied was that its just been a month since i started the blog and i have almost 1700+ hits on my site. Well, it really dosent matter if you have a CMS or a Blog .. what really matters is your content. My site mainly had weird out of the world crazy content that makes no sense .. really .. but the people i get are mainly from my part of the county and thats like college .. schools etc.

 

Make shure that whatever site you plan on making .. market it wisely. "Spread the word" ... Abhiram told me this, and it has worked well for me.

 

If your planning to use a CMS then my personal favourite would be e107. And it works just PERFECT on asta . Its got a HUGE user base and loads of plugins. And if you wana stick to a blog then WordPress would be the best one out there. WP has loads of plugins and themes ( I've used some on my blog too, if u want to check it out, those are just basic) .. but you can find plugins that even take care of ur adsence ad placements in your blog.

 

Let us know you site when your finished

 

Regards

Dhanesh.

Edited July 29, 2006 by dhanesh (see edit history)

[seec77 0]

I don't know about using CPanel's Fantastico, but try out Drupal. It's a great CMS system and it's really a breeze to install! Anyways, I just think that content should be presented with content management systems, while blogs and rants should be presented with blog software.

 

Drupal will really give you anything and everything you want... including a blog! There are so many modules and translations for it, and it's just so easy to use. Really, it could just be everything you want it to be.

[Vyoma 0]

Going through Dhanesh's and seec77's posts, has crystallized few of the needs that I need from my website:

 

(1) Publish articles, initially in few categories

(2) Taxonomy of all articles

(3) Initially single author / after some time multi-author

(4) Placements of ads after some time

(5) Feedback and discussion on articles

(6) Expansion of articles to more categories

(7) Delegate parts of roles to others incase of expansion

 

I know the above is a jumble with no chronological order of how I want to achieve, but at one point or other I would want to do those things.

 

(1) and (3) can be achieved by blog software quite easily. To some extent I should be able to do (2), (4), (5) and (6) with some effort. But I am not sure of (7). Though, expansion in terms of site administration is way ahead, I still need to consider that.

 

All that said, I still have a tendency to go for blog software now. I will be putting articles initially only in categories like 'Art and Design', 'Computers and Internet' and 'World Builing'. And only I will be authoring them. But I dream a bit big, and I see the site as a repository to good articles ranging into more categories, and obviously I cannot be doing that all alone.

 

May be I will install Drupal or some other CMS. I am not sure how I may publish articles in them. But I will keep it to a minimum configuration. As seec77 said, I may need to put in the blog module as I am versed in it, but I do not know. The issue is, it seems optimum now to install Blog Software, but in the very near future as I expand the article and category base, I think, I will surely need more than Blog Software to handle everything. But going for a CMS may be an overkill - I do not know, I have not used one yet.

 

Ah! The more I think, my head aches!

 

Anyway, I think the footprint of WordPress is just 2 MB or 3 MB. What is the range for size of CMS software? 20 MB to 30 MB? More or less?

 

Edit: I found out that Drupal aswell takes just about 2 MB. And I think PHP-Nuke takes about 25 MB. So, I think the range may be safely put around 1 MB to 30 MB depending on the particular CMS software.

Edited June 20, 2006 by Vyoma (see edit history)

[unimatrix 0]

I like Drupel for personal stuff. It has enough flexibilty and good features even if some things, like the menu system, isn't quite as straight foreward as other systems. I still like Joombla/Mambo for large complex sites, it makes managing such sites much easier, but for mostly what I do, it's operation overkill.

Another system to consider is Xoops. The last site I deployed for a client: http://www.transfigurationchurch.org/ was based on Xoops. I had to go and hack some of the content module code and fix some issues with it's Dynamic HTML menu system, but over all it too is a nice system. The one thing I don't like Xoops, compared to Drupel, is the lack of a centralized topic system. You can't create your topics and subcatagories and then use for the rest of the site in Xoops, you have to do it for each module. It's just a pain to set up, once that is done though, it's not that big of a deal.

[Vyoma 0]

I think I have almost made up my mind now - I would be going for a Content Management System. I am at present trying out Drupal. It seems to be quite robust and flexible.

 

I had installed it in the Xisto account using Fantastico - and it installed Drupal 4.5. I experimented around and liked it. I went over and checked at https://www.drupal.org/ and noticed that the stable version Drupal 4.7.2 was out. So, I removed the installation I had done (not a worry, as I had not yet put any content in it), and then installed it. It was quite a task, and I now know the cPanel pretty well.

 

While installing Drupal 4.7 manually, I faced problems using the MySQL that was already installed for 4.5, so I removed that too. I then created another MySQL database. I was a bit perplexed as to how I should be loading the Drupal database schema. Then, I saw the solution was to use the SQL input in the phpMyAdmin module of cPanel. All I had to do was run the script given in the drupal/database/mysql something script file and run it. The database was created without a problem. I could even go ahead and install few themes. I also installed the Adsense module - have to configure it yet.

 

unimatrix, I notice that you have quite a bit experience in configuring and tailoring CMS for websites. You said that Drupal was good for personal stuff - but I find it not the case as I went through the Drupal.org, and the admin panel of the one installed in my Xisto account. I find it quite scalable. But please do not take offence - it is just a view of a newbie. :(

 

Now, I think I should go ahead and cofigure it properly. Before that, I assume the logical step would be to crystallize the mission and purpose of my website, and also setting the parameters.

 

Configuring it seems quite a tug on the learning curve. I figure that since I am making an article library of sorts, I should understand the workin of Taxonomy module properly - a huge bunch of articles that are not properly categorized would be a waste.

 

Any Drupal users out there who could throw in some pointers?

[doudou 0]

I am in the processing of choosing a CMS software for my use and am tore between Wordpress and Drupal. It seems that although Drupal has more features and control ( I found an cms matrix site that will compare the feature of all the cms system out there, pretty cool) Wordpress has more themes to choose from. As for my site, it will not just be a blog site, I wanted to expand beyond that. If I tried out Drupal and didn’t like, is it easy to convert to Wordpress without losing any of my contents?

[Vyoma 0]

Hello there doudou. I think you are in quite the same situation as I was in about a week back. I would say that if you want a site that requires features more than that of a blog - quite considerably more, you would need to go for a Content Management System. And also, I have read it in some article somewhere (I cannot place it exactly from memory) that Drupal cannot be easily compared with other CMS using a matrix analysis due to a different approach it takes to storing content - it is almost object oriented. Every content is a node, and thus almost all operations may be done with each kind of content.Now for the other question that could you shift from Drupal to Wordpress. Well, I have to say that since I have worked with both of them, I do not see any easy way to convert all the content from Drupal to Wordpress.Another thing I would like to say about themes is that, though Drupal does not have many of themes out there, it does have a good community base out there and it would not take long before the themes start to get designed for Drupal. Moreover, it is very easy to customize the theme in Drupal. A good approach would be to choose a basic theme that is close to what you want and then configure it to your needs.