CMS for web presence

October 7, 2010 8:30 PM

I need a web presence for articles and pictures, and a way for readers to comment on both. I know a lot about web servers, and squat/all about web design, and I don't have oodles of free time... help me pick a CMS.

I have a static IP, and some serious unix-fu. I don't have a lot of web design chops, and even less time to learn some. I need to put a few articles online, with comments on them enabled, and an image gallery, with same. Maybe a few dozen articles, and not even that many pics. It doesn't need to be amazing, but it should look good with factory defaults and a small amount of tweaking... the last thing I need in my life right now is a crash course in CSS and Dreamweaver.* I understand that a good CMS will do what I want, but there are a lot of them out there... which one will do the best job with the least hassle?

(*A crash course in CSS and Dreamweaver will likely be another AskMeFi question in the future...)

posted by Slap*Happy to computers & internet (9 answers total)

Wordpress or perhaps Joomla if you wanna go all open source. But really, wordpress is the fastest, easiest answer here.
posted by smoke at 8:36 PM on October 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

Well, Wordpress is the big gun - tons of templates and styles and stuff. That might be your easy choice.
For our company, we're using CMS Made Simple. You might give that a try on a test system and see how you like it. I did minor tweaking to get it to look good with our company colors and design style. I don't think it does comments like you're asking, however - that is more "bloggy" than CMSy.
posted by Old'n'Busted at 8:39 PM on October 7, 2010

Go with WordPress, it's great. I've used CMS Made Simple and I really don't think it's what you're looking for. Though it's decent for managing large web sites, it's fairly kludgy and not very blog-oriented. If you want something nice looking with minimal hassle, trust me on this one and use WordPress.

If you're really curious about the alternatives, Open Source CMS is a great resource. They have a couple hundred systems running and allow you full admin access to any of them, to "try before you buy." Don't worry about screwing anything up; the site auto-resets every hour.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 9:40 PM on October 7, 2010

I use Wordpress for my portfolio. It's pretty easy to set up.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:03 PM on October 7, 2010

There's a bunch of ideas Here. I'll also pile on the Wordpress train, you really can't go wrong.
posted by Blake at 4:13 AM on October 8, 2010

Wordpress is awesome! My non-technical husband and I maintain a site with tons of articles and photos with Wordpress.
posted by MorningPerson at 6:01 AM on October 8, 2010

Wordpress++
posted by dougrayrankin at 6:10 AM on October 8, 2010

Wordpress is great, but when I found myself unable to install it once (long boring story), I tried Blogengine. Yeehaaw! I loooooooooooooove it. I post articles and nice big samples of my art online and it's perfect. It does most things Wordpress does, although fewer widgets are designed specifically for it. That didn't matter to me though. Anyway, good luck!
posted by frosty_hut at 7:59 AM on October 8, 2010

Nthing WordPress. Im actually a design pro, and I chose WP as the least-hassle engine for a photography project recently. I couldn't be happier with it. My ISP had it available from a "control panel" type installer; it took about five minutes. With (very) little tweaking, it can easily be made to lose it's "bloggy" appearance, if that matters to you. Also, there are several themes available that are, to put it mildly, minimal - perfect for jumping in and mangling up a bit of CSS madness if you get the urge (I can recommend the one called "WP-Framework" as being particularly "pure" in it's coding style and feature support).
posted by OneMonkeysUncle at 8:50 AM on October 8, 2010