Best Way to Organize/Display a List of Online Resources

June 18, 2007 1:54 PM

Hosted (free?) CMS to contain a directory of online resources and organizations for a college student population. Is there something better than blogspot for what we are doing? Also, is there a way to allow people to rate each post?

At work we are trying to create an online guide to showcase all of the online resources that our student population might be interested in. At the moment, we've been playing around with blogspot, where each organization gets it's own post, and we use tags to build a structure to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for. This isn't what blogger was actually built to do (we're not trying to blog) and I'm wondering if there is something as simple to use that would allow us to make this information easy accessible.

I haven't entirely ruled out using a wiki site, but I feel like it would be overkill for what we want. We are only going to have three people editing it and we want the display to be as simple as possible. Also, I'm not sure wikis would let us use tags the way we would like to and have people able to comment on each organization (i.e. post) the way you can with a blog.

Blogspot can do almost everything that we need, except I don't know how to do a rating system along with the tags, which we would like. Is there some type of plug-in/widget, service that would allow us to give people the opportunity to rate each post? Something like the 5 star system that all the video sharing sites have, but instead for individual posts on a blogspot blog?

[Right now we have the blogspot site up with the framework in place and lorem ipsum text for the organizations. Is it kosher to link to the site so people can have an idea of what we are trying to accomplish?]

posted by andoatnp to technology (6 comments total)

Sounds like a job for Pligg.
posted by strangeleftydoublethink at 2:02 PM on June 18, 2007

Unless Pligg can be used hosted elsewhere so we don't have to do it ourselves it looks like it's more complicated and complex than we would need.

If there is an easy way to allow people to rate individual posts with blogspot, then I think it is the best solution for us.

On the other hand, we're not using blogger as it's intended, so if there is a better solution for us that is designed for this purpose, I would love to hear about it.
posted by andoatnp at 2:13 PM on June 18, 2007

If you can self-host (available for < $100/year) then you'll have a lot more flexibility. for example, you could install a href="http://wordpress.org">Wordpress and experiment with a few of the plugins for rating posts. Drupal + plugins is another option, and I'm sure Anil will pop in if MoveableType can fill the bill. I'm sure there are even some PHP apps that do pretty much exactly what you want.
posted by Good Brain at 2:14 PM on June 18, 2007

Try Wordpress.com. That will more likely have the flexibility you need.
posted by strangeleftydoublethink at 2:19 PM on June 18, 2007

Does wordpress.com have a feature where readers can rate each post?

We would prefer to avoid any CMS that involves paying hosting fees or having to do the install and upkeep ourselves, as we are both low on funds for this and without technical know-how.

Is it not possible to set it up so that people can rate each post on a blogspot blog?

Thanks for the input so far.
posted by andoatnp at 2:38 PM on June 18, 2007

As far as ratings go, I hit google again and after more searching came up with this: Spotback It seems to do exactly what I need.

Looks like hacked up blogger is what we'll be using. Thanks all.
posted by andoatnp at 5:51 AM on June 19, 2007