Content Management System for my personal website?

July 28, 2005 9:05 AM

I am looking for a Community-style Content Management System to use as the platform for my personal web page. And a good hosting service.

I used to have a regular hand-coded html web page I updated irregularly for a few years. However, I could not give the link out to many people because there were pages in there that I did not want teachers, family or potential employers to see. I ended up taking it down. After a while, I started a livejournal. That seemed to work for a while, and it was a fun experience but eventually I ran into the same problem - nearly all of my entries were locked to friends-only, and there was nothing left for my adoring public to see.

What I am looking for is a software platform that will give allow me the flexibility I need to have the home page I've always wanted. The CMS I am looking for needs individual user accounts and a variety of security levels or user groups to sort them all out. Some of my entries and content will be open to the public for the entire world to see. For everything else - sections devoted to my personal life, my lovelife, my secret life as an undercover CIA operative posing as a pagan cult leader - only users in a certain usergroup or of a certain security level will have access to those sections. So, a user logging in as a colleague could see my resume, but NOT my balloon fetish page.

There should be some sort of blogging tool in it, maybe an announcement or news section I could plop down in the middle of the front page where I could updates and what not.

One important feature is the support and hosting of ancillary pages. I want to integrate my old, original website into my new one, but I want the links and pages open only to those whose user accounts have clearance. Sure, I could just hide the links and leave the pages themselves public, but there's still the off chance of the link being stumbled over or shared, or cached by google or the wayback machine. The front page should render a different, unique template for each unique class of user. The software would serve up the links and pages only to logged-in users who have the appropriate flags. So, the web page full of pictures and amusing captions of my binge drinking days is only available to college buddies, and my recreational drug usage pages are only available to former Saturday night live cast members and wall street traders.

It should have some kind of forum system, so my friends can start threads and post to each other. A files section allowing privileged users access to special folders and giving them the power to upload files if they choose. And a photo gallery would be great too. The forums, gallery and files sections should work the same way, with some forums open to the public and then some private sections. Then all the other bells and whistles that make up a community site would be nice additions - polls, calendars, site statistics, etc. I want all that, AND a Pony!

I think PHBbb can do most of those things, and maybe be modded to do the rest. Can anyone who has more experience with community sites give me a little information into that?

Finally, I need a place to host this whole rigmarole. Can anyone recommend a good hosting company?

posted by illuminatus to computers & internet (7 answers total)

If you're comfortable with php you might be happy with Drupal.
posted by phearlez at 10:55 AM on July 28, 2005

Thanks for the tip! Right now I'm investigating NukePHP, it looks pretty robust. Then again I am asking for quite a bit now that I look over my requirements. The more I think about it the more I realize that this might end up costing quite a bit of money.
posted by illuminatus at 11:37 AM on July 28, 2005

I use Expression Engine for all of that stuff you listed (blog, content, forums, photo galleries, etc) and it works great. Not free though, I think it will cost you about $200 for the total package.

Support is really good too, the developers respond in the forums almost immediately. They offer their own hosting, but I haven't used it, so I can't comment on it.

I use Dreamhost to host, it has been decent, but not stellar, but it seems to have one of the better price to benefit ratios around.
posted by jonah at 5:24 PM on July 28, 2005

I'd second Drupal, but that may be because I'm cheap and I enjoy playing with Free / open source software. Drupal is flexible and quite themeable. It has modules for all your needs and the security is granular and would seem to fit your needs. I'm not completly sure how you'd integrate existing pages, but I'd bet, with the communities help, you can find a way. Check out a gallery of Drupal site here and some case studies here.

I'll also second Dreamhost. I've hosted there for 5 years or so. They have an amazing price / benefit ratio. They have a pretty good uptime and the control panel isn't bad. If I wasn't going to go with Dreamhost I'd probably go with Site5.
posted by tayknight at 7:43 PM on July 28, 2005

So far so good! As it stands now, Drupal really has caught my eye, and I'm plowing through the heap of documentation they put online for the system.

I found another site in my travels, CMS Matrix, that lists about 100 CMS systems, and lets you compare the features. It's really handy, and it turned me on to a few other systems that might suit my needs: Mambo server, movable type, wordpress, EZ Cms, Plone, Typeo3, Sitelite, NukePHP and others.

This is going to take a while!
posted by illuminatus at 8:22 AM on July 29, 2005

It looks like Drupal is the winner, it's well presented, well thought out, has a great reputation for very clean and simple open source code, very flexible, has a lot of feature mods which are all centrally available and documented. And the user management features which are so vital to my community site are apparently built-in.

The only other system I am still considering is mambo server.
posted by illuminatus at 12:27 PM on July 30, 2005

I mentioned WebGUI and ValueCMS in a more recent post (I'm working backwards tonight...).

Worth looking at...
posted by baylink at 5:20 PM on August 4, 2005