Looking for simple content management for non-techies

September 19, 2006 10:35 AM

Looking for a web content-management or wiki-ish system that can be easily used by non-tech-oriented academics.

I'm an experienced programmer currently futzing around in academia. A group that I'm part of wants to establish a web presence, and I became the go-to guy for setting it up. As a programmer, my first impulse would be to implement someone else's design in raw HTML and then manage it via sFTP... but that would require all updates to go through me and that's no good.

So my priority is to find some way for these profs and students to update the webpage themselves. If it's difficult to set up initially, that's OK because I'll be around. But ongoing management should be a breeze. Other important properties:
1) it should be free or cheap
2) it should be something that hosting sites would have installed, or could install easily over software they do have (like... php-based, for example).

A wiki would frankly be fine if we could find a commercial host that was relatively inexpensive and offered wiki capabilities., so if you know any hosts like that, fire away.

posted by rkent to technology (10 comments total)

WikiMatrix provides a helpful choice wizard, so you can enter in your requirements and it tells you which programs fit your needs. I've used its suggestions for academic purposes with great success.
posted by leesh at 10:53 AM on September 19, 2006

I used WordPress to set up a quick site for a political candidate - it also allows you to create and manage pages, subpages etc along with the blog stuff. In fact, you could ingnore the blog component altogether if you wanted to.

I hosted it at Dreamhost as it is one of their "one click" installs. They have the same setup for MediaWiki. If you want my Dreamhost discount code, let me know.
posted by mikepop at 10:53 AM on September 19, 2006

dokuwiki is probably one of the easiest wikis to setup.
posted by delmoi at 10:55 AM on September 19, 2006

Drupal is easy to deploy, and it's php based so it should work as long as you can point it at a database of some kind. I haven't looked into it in depth, but from everything I've seen it seems very customizable and full-featured. As I recall, they also have a wiki module, which is pretty nice.
posted by Rictic at 10:55 AM on September 19, 2006

I'd go with Drupal. The problem with WordPress is that it doesn't support multiple authors very well. You can do it, but a lot of add-on functionality can't deal with it. Drupal is multi-user from the ground-up.

And, there's a ton of development going on, so putting together a reasonably-sophisticated site is fairly straightforward, and maintenance is very, very easy.
posted by mkultra at 11:25 AM on September 19, 2006

Quick write up of my experiences here

I tried out wordpress, drupal and mambo and ended up with wordpress.

I actually use two systems, wordpress with a separate wiki (PHPWiki) for my wiki needs. Though there are wiki plugins for wordpress.
posted by bitdamaged at 12:03 PM on September 19, 2006

Movable Type meets your requirements. It's cheap and uses technology commonly supported by commercial hosts. It's also elegant, flexible, and designed for multiple users.
posted by sudama at 1:00 PM on September 19, 2006

Google Pages, also.

Or Google Apps for your Domain.
posted by empath at 1:22 PM on September 19, 2006

There's this academic specific CMS called Elgg that looks extremely promising, the test account I set up worked well.
posted by jeremias at 6:46 PM on September 19, 2006

When jeremias said academic, he was talking about educators, not researchers.

My vote would be for a blogging platform with a wiki module, but realistically, even something simple is going to become defunct if there's no one technologically inclined in charge of it. So when you leave, you'll have to either train your replacement, or they'll actually have to bring someone on. Perhaps they could share the cost with colleagues?
posted by Mr. Gunn at 8:14 PM on September 19, 2006