What simple blog software should I use?

September 16, 2007 11:21 PM

Help me choose a very simple blogging software!

Okay. I'm designing a website for my girlfriend, who is a working artist. I've got everything done, but I want her to be able to update 2 pages through a password-protected form. Those pages would be the main/news page, and the shows/exhibits page.

I've used wordpress before, which would allow me to do this, except I find it overly complicated, especially for a very simple task like this. What I want is something like what Greymatter does, which is allows me to use my existing HTML as a template, and then insert {tags} into it where I want the blog content to be, like {title}, {body}, etc, rather than rewrite the whole bloody thing into an all-php wordpress template.

Any ideas?

posted by sunimplodes to computers & internet (8 comments total)

It sounds like what you're looking for is a really-small CMS rather than a really-small blog (though people often use blogging software as a CMS, since designd-as-a-CMS software tends to be pretty big and complex).

Could you do what you're looking for with something as simple as .shtml server-side includes?
posted by hattifattener at 11:45 PM on September 16, 2007

dotclear is an alternative to wordpress you may want to check out.
posted by Baud at 1:37 AM on September 17, 2007

Could you do what you're looking for with something as simple as .shtml server-side includes?

Absolutely it would, but I'd need an interface for her to post updates, as she doesn't know how to deal with an FTP application or HTML paragraph formatting.

All else fails, I can just use two instances of Greymatter for the two pages, but I think it would be an overly complex solution.
posted by sunimplodes at 2:54 AM on September 17, 2007

I can suggest my own software - demo here, but it's probably too complex for what you want. You also need a web host with FastCGI support (dreamhost and a small orange are two that come to mind) and being a perl app, the initial setup is a bit fiddly.
posted by singingfish at 3:15 AM on September 17, 2007

I use dreamhost, so that works. I'll check it out. Thanks.
posted by sunimplodes at 4:47 AM on September 17, 2007

I'm being paid to do some development on it right at the moment, so expect a version with simple file uploads, and a basic forum and maybe comments in the next couple of weeks...
posted by singingfish at 4:53 AM on September 17, 2007

oh duh. obvious solution...

get an account at http://vox.com

get your gf to post to her vox blog using two different tags - say 'news' and 'exhibits'

now you can get the rss feeds from the url like this:

http://www.vox.com/explore/posts/tags/apple/atom-full.xml (note the atom-full.xml file name, not atom.xml as advertised on the vox pages). You'll obviously have to fiddle around to get the right url for the two different tags.

Then use this cgi script (untested by me) on the web server to do atom2html: http://www.briangreene.com/atom2html.txt

Actually that script looks horrible, it would be better to find something more appropriate on cpan...

Sorted.
posted by singingfish at 5:08 AM on September 17, 2007

Expression Engine can do this. I'm not sure if it's too complicated for your gf though.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 8:28 AM on September 17, 2007