Help me find a good hosting platform for a lit journal.

September 1, 2012 10:12 AM

Help me find a good hosting platform for a lit journal.

So I'm starting an online lit journal but I'm unsure of what is the best way to host it. I've used Wordpress for similar purposes before but I've always found it very restricting and difficult to style.

I plan on running this as a quarterly (or possibly bi-quarterly), so the ability to distinguish between issues is pretty important. I'm also planning on releasing an eBook of edition of each issue.

I have a bit of space and a domain name already, but I'd rather have a better hosting platform than my current solution (uploading PHP files via FTP). Mostly I want to be able to customize the platform to my needs without starting from scratch. I work as a web developer so doing a little programming is not a problem for me – I just don't want to reinvent the wheel.

posted by deathpanels to computers & internet (2 answers total)

It may be overkill depending on your editorial process, but OJS is free, open source software that would do what you needed. We use it as the publishing platform for the open access journal imprint at my library.
posted by donnagirl at 10:41 AM on September 1, 2012 [1 favorite]

How about using a web framework like CodeIgniter? CI makes it so much faster to develop new sites by providing lots of functionality out of the box. You'll still need to work with PHP files but you will have total control of the code.

But if you want a CMS it would help if you could elaborate on what you don't like about Wordpress. Most CMSs have the same architecture so I'm not sure you would find competing products that much different.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 10:51 AM on September 1, 2012