Recommend a CMS for my client

January 20, 2004 10:44 AM

I need a small scale content management thingie which will allow a large corporate client to easily update news items on their homepage, something simple where they just drop in a file into a folder and it shows up as a 1 line link on the homepage with a link to the full article.
posted by signal to computers & internet (8 comments total)

For values of "a file" meaning raw text or HTML (or Wiki-style markup, with the proper plugin), you could pretty easily rig something up with blosxom, which works pretty much exactly as you describe.
posted by majick at 10:48 AM on January 20, 2004

FYI, Blosxum does not come in Windows. In case that matters...
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 12:09 PM on January 20, 2004

I have actually played with blosxom a bit, and it looks like it might do the trick. I wonder if there are other easier to configure solutions out there?
posted by signal at 12:09 PM on January 20, 2004

Hmm, interesting... I've never had problems with Blosxom on Windows; It Just Works.

I'm not sure how much easier to configure you're going to get: What you want to do with Blosxom should take about ten minutes to set up. You just fiddle the template file a bit to make it do title-as-link, configure your content directory, and throw some content in. You'll be pretty hard pressed to find something simpler for what you want to do, although it's quite possible there's some drop-in PHP script out there that provides similar "list of links" functionality. Even then, I can't imagine it being any more straightforward.
posted by majick at 12:33 PM on January 20, 2004

plone (which is layered on top of zope) has a web interface that lets you "upload" a file to a directory. not sure if that's what you want, but there's no configuration involved apart from installing it (you can extend/modify it with python, but out of the box it does this with no extra work). i didn't post this earlier because i thought all cms did this - not sure exactly what you're looking for that's different (and not terribly experienced with cms either).

(the plone site is more or less standard plone, afaik, so you can see what you'll get)
posted by andrew cooke at 12:38 PM on January 20, 2004

Hmmm... Do you want to have the writer drop the content into a folder on their Windows desktop? I have seen this with some of the bloatware content management systems (Interwoven comes to mind) but I can't think of a smaller one that does this.

Andrew is right about plone... you can upload a file and have it be displayed as a content object, but as far as I remember it is removed by one step from the index... that is, you have to click twice to get to it, and it isn't automatically parsed. And plone isn't exactly simple to set up, as you need to run Zope, etc.

If you want small-scale/cheap solution without the drop-and-publish, then I would recommend one of the usual suspects: Movable Type or Blogger. D. Keith Robinson has used MT for a hospital intranet.
posted by tranquileye at 12:57 PM on January 20, 2004

you're probably right about the clicking stuff, but iirc plone provide a single install doodah - you don't need to install zope separately first (but otoh i'm a programmer, so even if the install involved altering code i could still remember it as "simple", and it was a fair time ago...)
posted by andrew cooke at 1:13 PM on January 20, 2004

I wonder if CityDesk might be worth a look.
posted by cedar at 8:13 AM on January 21, 2004