Wiki or CMS that will work for this?

July 11, 2008 11:44 AM

I need a Wiki or CMS that has a WYSIWYG editor for a site with about a 100 static pages, sorted into categories.

I'm trying to revamp an extranet website for an elementary school, where they store all the information about their programs, tution, phone lists, fundraising, etc., and parents and staff can login and look at all that and print it out.

Right now I've got this site setup with Edit-Point, a really lightweight CMS, which uses TinyMCE for the WYSIWYG editor and just saves to .txt files. It's great for editing existing pages...as long as the navigation part of the site never changes.

That's the problem. They want to be able to add new pages, and change the names of existing pages, and have that be tied to the navigation. But I've got the navigation set up in a Javascript drop-down menu, which I have to go in and manually edit whenever they want to change anything. It's a pain in the ass.

I've used Wordpress before, and like it for some stuff, but I don't like how adding new 'pages' works. Maybe there's a plugin for sites that only want to have a lot of 'pages' sorted into categories, but I feel like that kind of goes against what WordPress is.

Something like PmWiki is closer to what I'm looking for, where there is just a long list of pages on the side - but you have to use their special markup, which I really don't like, and won't fly for this.

There's no budget for this, so open source would be great.

posted by andrewzipp to computers & internet (9 comments total)

movable type 4 does this perfectly, and it comes in a fully-functional open source flavor!
posted by lia at 12:08 PM on July 11, 2008

Drupal. There's a TinyMCE module that works very well, so that's covered. You can either use Drupal's Categories to categorize or, as I suspect, set up different content types for the different types of entries you may have. Changing menus is very easy, and you can do it either from the Menu admin page or from the edit tab of the page you are changing. No special markup for your users to learn.

It's free and open source. You just need PHP and MySQL from you host.
posted by bricoleur at 12:25 PM on July 11, 2008

Um, "from your host."
posted by bricoleur at 12:26 PM on July 11, 2008

Wordpress will do what you want quite easily.
posted by SirStan at 12:31 PM on July 11, 2008

I'm a huge fan of Expression Engine for this kind of stuff. If you give the architecture enough thought it will spit out the nav dynamically and reflect any changes/additions that you make.

EE is remarkably flexible and, while not open source (there is a free "Core" version), isn't too expensive.
posted by cedar at 1:10 PM on July 11, 2008

Ok...maybe this will work in Wordpress.

I got a plugin called Mass Page Maker that will let me easily set up all the 100 or so pages, and another plugin called pageMash that will let me sort them in to categories easily.

Any suggestions on making the list look nicer? I haven't seen a lot of nice menus in Wordpress yet.
posted by andrewzipp at 2:10 PM on July 11, 2008

A local company called Vernal Creative blogged about their efforts to convert a local non-profit organization called Craft Emergency Relief Fund from Drupal to Wordpress. I really like the outcome. The site isn't 2.0 modern, but its still nice looking and has a good look.

Wordpress doesn't dictate your design (much).
posted by SirStan at 2:53 PM on July 11, 2008

I'd totally second Expression Engine.
posted by mac-way at 3:33 PM on July 11, 2008

I work with the Movable Type team, and it's great at exactly this kind of stuff. It's free and open source and there are even templates for proper sites like this, that don't look like blogs, but rather have a set of pages accessed by navigation. And the pages are static, so it handles traffic better than some of the other options here if you're on a simple web server. Plus, it has much better security than WordPress, so your school won't have to worry about getting hacked or having constant security updates.
posted by anildash at 7:21 PM on July 11, 2008