Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with cms

Help me learn old school web design

anotherpanacea — Sat, 11 May 2013 11:11:40 -0800

I have recently taken charge of an old webpage that is a bit out of date on a university server. I am primarily familiar with Google Sites and Wordpress, where there's a CMS editor, but here it's just an ftp site with raw index files that require Spry to run. What do I need to edit it? Would it be relatively easy to create a redirect to a site that I control running a CMS I understand? How do I keep that from ruining all the old backlinks?

CMS recommendation

meghosaurus — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 08:33:30 -0800

Best CMS for a feature-heavy website on a budget? My go-to content management systems are Wordpress and Drupal, but here's the clincher: this website must integrate with Microsoft Access. My NPO is doing a long-overdue site overhaul. Most of the feature requests can be handled by any decent CMS, but there's a private members-only section for viewing/updating personal information that requires two-way integration with Microsoft Access (where the profile info is stored).

My research indicates that most open source platforms don't play well with Microsoft, for rather obvious reasons. I'm not a developer, and am trying to figure out how complicated this integration really is. Should we stick with a robust option like Drupal, and just develop a custom plugin? What do I even need to look for in a developer? Are we limited to content management systems designed for Micro$oft (DotNetDuke)? I'm at a loss for what to google.

If helpful, our other feature requirements are listed below.

• Ability to accommodate rich media (video embedding, podcasts, photo gallery)
• Content pages and blog posts
• Social integration (e.g., display of social feeds)
• Responsive design for smart phone and tablet
• Search friendly, with metadata fields and sitemap
• User-friendly editing system (WYSIWYG, inline editing) for both text and media
• Google Analytics enabled
• Online form submissions for prayer requests, emails, event registration and requests
for information
• Online shopping cart with PayPal or integration with similar service
• Onsite translation to Spanish (excluding PDFs)
• Private members-only section with message board, online forum, password retrieval
assistance, two-way integration with Microsoft Access for displaying/maintaining member profiles
• Strongly prefer green hosting (not just carbon offsets, but wind/solar powered).

CMS VS POD

pmaxwell — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 11:03:20 -0800

Content Management Systems allow users to manage/publish web content. A Print on Demand system allows users manage/publish print content. I need a single system that does both. I am looking for a system that allows for the creation and production of both web and print deliverables. For example, if I wanted to produce a 16 page report, I (or someone w/ access to the system) would login to the system, paste or key in the content into the relevant fields, add art from the library and once reviewed/approved, the system formats it into a pre-approved templated design. Once approved, I can output a hi rez pdf for printing OR port that content into a related template and output an html file for web usage.

I would like this system to be a repository for all publishing assets for this client – 20 different types of templates, eBlast templates, Microsites, banner ads – everything my client needs to manage and produce a variety of print or screen documents on their own – based on an templated design system.

One other note: I would like to have the ability to use fonts beyond "web safe" fonts for the print outputs.
Any ideas? thanks.

CMS for book project

Harald74 — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 02:14:57 -0800

I'm considering writing a technical book, mostly a labour of love. I want to do the writing process online, like Bruce Eckel did for his excellent Thinking in Java years ago. In order to facilitate user feedback, Eckel had a very fine-grained commenting system, which he developed himself and called TalkBack. At the end of each paragraph there was a "comment" link that let users comment on that particular paragraph. Are there any other CMS that offers fine-grained feedback like that? I'm aware of an older (2003-2004?) Zope TalkBack implementation, but would like something more current. And if you think I'm looking for the wrong thing and should go about writing a book on the web differently, please chime in!

Content management systems in Ruby -- where are they at in 2013?

steinsaltz — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 10:48:19 -0800

I'm interested in using a Ruby CMS as a substitute for the usual Wordpress or Drupal. Although I know my way around Rails, I am not sure whether there might be a good off-the-shelf way to make the control panel as easy to use for regular folks who are not programmers. I know there are some gems with pre-fab admin panels and stuff like that. And I've looked around at some of the screenshots of Refinery and Locomotive and similar systems. I am wondering which is the furthest along in development and what the best way to go would be for a large organization with a small budget and short deadline.

Mostly, I wonder if anyone out there has had any good experiences using these as substitutes for, say, Drupal? I'm conflicted because while Drupal tends to be preferred by the kinds of organizations I want to work with -- and I even have a soft spot for its arcane PHP hooks -- I'd like to see if it is possible to reach the same ends in Ruby.

The customers comes first, though, and I would hate to annoy them by putting my computer science interests ahead of easy dashboard controls.

I talked to a guy recently who said he tried to make his own Wordpress clone in Ruby and went running back to it after he realized he had failed to appreciate how many wonderful things it does for you.

Anyhow, has anyone ever used one of these Ruby on Rails CMSes for a pretty big website and found it a good substitute for the popular PHP ones?

Idea/Highlight Crowdsourcing Platform for a Conference

zresearch — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 11:05:57 -0800

I'd like some advice about creating a live website exercise for the audience at an industry conference. The exercise is about getting the audience to crowdsource highlights from the conference panels/speakers (this has the support of the conference organizers). The highlights will be a take-away summary for everyone. It will also be used for my research purposes.

All panels will be in the same big room, so there is no worry about multiple sessions happening at the same time. Lots of people in the audience will be tapping away on their laptops/mobile phones anyway. I'd like to collect highlights on a panel by panel basis, and to make it easy, low-effort and straightforward structurally for everyone to participate (so this is why, for instance, I am not choosing a wiki as a platform). Say there are about 200-300 people in the audience (naturally, most of them will choose not to participate).

I'm asking people to keep their highlight submissions short (say, Twitter length-ish). I would like there to be a quick poll question attached to each submission (basically a measure of how much important people think the highlight is, and how certain it is. This poll would be done by both the poster and others)

What would be a good platform for organizing this? I originally thought of Posterous but unfortunately it looks like Twitter will be abandoning that platform pretty soon.
Ideally, people should have the option of emailing in their highlights (with the posts coming up on the website almost instantly), and also of tweeting highlights. So maybe some kind of big group blog?

Free or very cheap sites are preferable

Thanks very much for any suggestions!

How to enable the WYSIWYG editor in Joomla...?

KokuRyu — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 16:29:21 -0800

How to enable the WYSIWYG editor in Joomla...? I'm a board member on a tiny non-profit, and I administer the website, which uses a Joomla - CMS.

We were recently hacked, and the website was hacked. We were able to restore with a backup, which is great.

However, the WYSIWYG editor appears to be gone from the article manager (or whatever the hell you call it in Joomla). After doing some searching, I discovered that WYSIWYG is non-native in Joomla, and you need a plugin to enable it.

Or do you? I'm used to using Wordpress and Drupla, which come with basic WYSIWYG editors for pages and posts. For example, in WP, all you have to do is switch between the "visual" and "html" tabs.

I looked for a similar button or whatever even the article editor in Joomla, but couldn't find it.

Am I missing something obvious? Or do I have to somehow install a plugin in Joomla? The previous admin has left the board and is studying at medical school, so I can't really bug him too much.

I'm considering using Wordpress to just rebuild the website from scratch, but that will take about 10 hours which I don't have right now.

Any Joomla tips would be appreciated!

Help us switch to Drupal

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 07:22:27 -0800

The case for Drupal? Or, why we should ditch Kintera and not choose BlueState or Expression Engine, etc. I work at a large non-profit umbrella group with 501(c)3, 501(c)4 and PAC subgroups. We've been on a ten-year contract with Kintera, and aside from the fact that Kintera's a mighty pain in the ass to use, it's costing us thousands of dollars per month.

We've been talking about a migration for a while now, but we're dealing with a board who don't know a lot about technology, and the communications director and operations director disagree about what to switch to. The coms director likes Drupal, the ops director likes … well, whatever his friends at different organizations are playing with at the moment. Expression Engine and BlueState are the big ones.

Our big needs are a) hosting and organizing content, b) taking contributions in a secure, robust way, and c) easy to train new people on.

So: I'd like to know what clear advantages Drupal has over other systems outside of being a free license, specifically regarding what we need, and why you would choose it over BlueState or Expression Engine, etc. (We do have a couple of contractors and designers who will do the install/migration and provide some ongoing support for Drupal, so support is less of a problem than it might otherwise be.)

What are things you'd highlight? What are (especially non-profit) sites that really use Drupal well? What advantages do Expression Engine and BlueState have over Drupal? Is there anything we should know or be wary of?

Can we chat about it?

Rabarberofficer — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 04:49:12 -0800

Need a chat/forum-solution for a limited time. Since I've been out of the loop for some time I look to you, mighty Mefites, to hear you personal choises and recommendations. For an activity I need to set up a chat/forum-solution on our website. And (horray!) we actually have some money to put forward to it.

Do you have a recommendations, based on the following requirements?

1. Open for anyone to ask questions. (No login required.)
2. Threaded questions (so that follow up questions can be asked in the same thread as the main question).
3. Several admins to answer the questions.
4. Admins have to be alerted when a follow up question is asked in a thread.
5. The admins will be fairly novices when it comes to chat/forums - so easier is better.
6. If possible we're looking for a off-site hosted solutions - but we need to be able to pull the info out and use for educational purposes after the discussions are ended.
7. Number of users: We don't really expect loads and loads of visitors, so there's no risk of the solution beeing pummeled.

The chat/forum will be integrated (or linked) to from our existing cms-solution.

So looking forward to hear your recommendations to help us move forward on this!

One website solution to rule them all

digividal — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 01:18:24 -0800

Is there a open source or inexpensive (its for a charity) web based solution that contains a cms, a blog (wordpress), an extensible forum (phpBB), a digg like system for voting on submitted links (pligg), and less important an image gallery that allows members to upload their photos. I have found good candidates in each fo the categories and they are all good application.

However making it into a cohesive experience for the user base will be difficult:

* Theming will have to be implemented for each spart independently
* Users will have to create an account in each system (no single sign on)

So is there something out there that provides
* cms
* blog
* forum
* votable news section
* Perhaps a photo section where users can contribute photos

The idea is to have an active and collaborative approach with the users.

Do we need a CMS for our business website?

jeather — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 09:24:53 -0800

My small business is redoing its website. We are hiring people, and the main difference is: no CMS or two choices of open-source CMS. Do we want to go with the (more expensive) CMS option? Notes:

We do not now and will never need e-commerce.
We do need a blog, which the no-CMS guy will create (he suggested hosting it on blogger/wordpress, which I am unwilling to do). It does not need comments. He would also make it possible to put the headlines on our front page, which we need.
We will have CMS-like functionality (eg, go to a webpage and change something) for a few bits of content that will need regular changing, the rest would have to be changed by me going into the html and editing it myself, which I am comfortable doing, but which means either I have to do it or we need to pay for it to be done each time.
The impression I get is that there is less design freedom if you use a CMS, and I am sometimes tired of all the websites that look identical.
A CMS also has a lot of power that we don't need and would require upgrading, and might cause problems if updating it ceased in the near future.

I do not know enough about this to make an informed decision, as obviously the people who are pro-CMS think it makes more sense, while the people who are not think it makes less sense.

Painlessly manage a story website programmatically?

zeek321 — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 19:23:21 -0800

I'm a programmer, and I want to create a static website to host my stories. This thing can be quite ugly. People will still find me and read because of my niche topic. I do want to self-host so I can stick in a good contact form and collect emails to send out story updates and stuff.

I'm got a simple one column template, but I'm already going crazy pasting headers and fixing Chapter 1, 2, 3 links. And the layout isn't well tagged for simply changing the CSS to get different looks.

I've gotten a simple rails app running on Heroku before, but that's got to be overkill. But there's GOT to be an easier way to do this--I should be able to generate pages using fields and templates! And easily change the look and feel by fiddling and regenerating!

I see a lot of programmatic static website generators when I google... Can anyone recommend anything?

Should I use a CMS instead? I feel like a generator would ultimately be simpler--I don't really want to deal with a database or the security issues of a dynamic site. But I was also thinking of using Django because I think I can have auto-generated database pages with copy and paste fields? But again, this site is really going to be very simple

What would you do, if you'd rather spend your time writing than managing a website, but you still want total control and your own domain? I shouldn't be hunting down broken links in the year 2012!

Help me choose an upgrade path for my vintage site and get my info to a database?

Banky_Edwards — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 18:02:49 -0800

I'm looking for some guidance in my quest to enter a moderate amount of information into a database, and then choose an appropriate front-end to display that data with a small array of filters and search options. The project is not complicated; I mostly want to avoid wasting time learning things the hard way (in contrast to my usual style). Short background info: about 15 years ago, I began to accumulate a large number of live recordings of Robert Hunter, which is a fairly niche hobby, even in the world of Deadheads. I ended up creating a simple website to list all his known tour dates and setlists, along with recording info and other miscellaneous notes/details. Although I haven't made any significant updates for over a decade, I'm now sitting on a ton of new and corrected information, and I'd like to bring this little hobby site into the 21st century.

My first question is, what's the best way to go about getting this information into a database? I am actually a web designer with some experience using MySQL, so my issue isn't really conceptual. But it turns out I don't really know how to populate my database before I create my site. Should I just enter my data in Microsoft Access, and then convert the Access DB to a more universal format? Or is there a good front-end tool that would help me get it into a MySQL-ready file from the start?

The second, related question is, what would be the best/easiest platform to build this site on? A couple of years ago, I built a Drupal site from scratch - I set up a spare box with Drupal, PHP and MySQL, and tinkered around until I had a working, reasonably tricked out CMS site. But that could well be overkill for the simpler site I have in mind for this project. Basically, I want to display any or all of the dates in my archive, with options to filter by date, venue, recordings, &c.; as well as the ability to search for shows where specific songs were performed. And that's about it - no news section, no forums, no calendars, basically nothing but the shows.

I've never used WordPress, and I would love to add that to my toolbox - would it be appropriate in this case? Should I stick with Drupal, since a second project on a newer version would also enhance my resume? Or am I totally overthinking this, and I should be thinking about creating a simple, custom PHP pages to do the search & display? In the end I don't actually need any CMS features, but if it's not a lot of extra work, I think the practice would be valuable. I just don't want to waste time building a palace when I just need a bunk house.

CMS for science!

caution live frogs — Thu, 17 May 2012 10:44:14 -0800

Looking for a good content management system for a science research lab website. Any suggestions? I'm part of a collaborative research lab group, one with many PIs across several institutions. We want to establish some sort of web presence, as we can't rely on one specific institution to cover all of us (not all are affiliated with each institution, and content updates from some institutes are so slow that many of us are practically professionally invisible online). Hosting I can figure out, but I need recommendations for a content management system.

We need the following:
-Main landing page with overview of the group

-Ability to have a set of static pages for each researcher, with a bio and link for CV (ideally each researcher would have their own subdomain, so ability to drop these pages into subdirectories would be great)

-Static pages for specific research topics (my plan is to start putting QR codes on conference materials so that interested people have direct links to more info on what is being presented)

-Ideally a closed (private) section of the site where we can host lab protocols and the like for internal sharing (wiki-type CMS for this might be good)

-Entire thing must be dead simple, because I am not going to lock myself into being the only person who knows how to add or edit content

Wordpress was the first thing I thought of but it's geared more towards blogs and less towards static pages. A bloggy part of the site may be useful down the road but that's not the main purpose.

I'm thinking there may not be one CMS that works well for all of the above, but if there are specific CMS tools that can each do part of the job well I'm happy to cobble them all together.

Kicker is that I'd like it to not LOOK like I just cobbled it all together. I'd really prefer that the entire site have a relatively unified style, so CMS systems that make it hard to do so are not preferred (pipe dream: one CSS file for the whole shebang would be my preference). Systems that use modern, valid code are strongly preferred as well.

What can I use to make my website?

nivekraz — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 07:38:39 -0800

Network guy dipping toes into web development. I want to create a "simple" site. The site would have members enter text and create tags for that text. The user would then generate "reports" based on the tags into templates. The data entered and reports generated would only we viewable by the user that entered it. I guess it would be a multi-user web based Cyrstal reports type of thing. What is the right tool for the job? It would be nice if I could use a pre-build enviroment like a CMS (Drupal, Joomla) as I have access to training and web host offer simple installers. I am savvy with Linux and would prefer free software.

Wordpress and Customer Service

divabat — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 03:07:46 -0800

Wordpress users: is the customer service still as shit as it used to be circa 2006-2007? So the main reason I hate Wordpress with a passion and shudder when anyone recommends it to me is because I used to be on WP.com from 2006 to 2009 and encountered some of the worst customer service ever. Any suggestions would be met with derision by Matt who would snarl "go get your own server then", even if it's stuff that affected accessibility (such as printouts of WP.com blogs not coming out right). There was once a Wordpress Wank blog and I remembered being chewed out on there by Matt in the comments claiming I was "rude" and belligerent because I dared make a suggestion.

I have had to use Wordpress (the self-hosted version) for other people's projects and I haven't really been fond of it either - I found some tasks, such as embedding video links, much harder than it should be. But as I try to get my web presence back up and running I find that other options elude me. I still haven't found a working Tumblr clone (I got chased off Tumblr by its rabid toxicity and if I return I'll certainly be spotted again) and while I love Textpattern the design options for it aren't great and I don't have the chops to come up with my own design or hire someone to do it for me. (I tried Posterous for a while but it was super buggy.)

I feel like I have to go back on Wordpress simply because more people develop for me, but I really don't want to be subjected to rubbish customer service again. Is there hope? Are there other options?

Dealing with Wordpress and Web-based WYSIWYGs

yeahyeahyeahwhoo — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 09:02:14 -0800

Does anyone have any tips for dealing with less savvy users of web-based WYSIWYG products like TinyMCE (which Wordpress uses) and/or improving the usability on the back-end? The best users I've worked with seem to universally use the HTML editor, while the rest fight with the visual editor to varying degrees of success. I know the number one problem is formatted cut+pasting from word and websites, but even once some of these users get past that, issues still crop up. Any tips, or good low level documentation that someone has seen would be appreciated.

Website CMS options for a religious organization?

odinsdream — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 20:44:37 -0800

What's the best CMS for a busy church with a bunch of committees full of non-technical people? Are there professional website maintenance companies that deal specifically with religious organizations? I'm one of the very few technical people in our 300-member church (UU fellowship, actually) and we're looking to replace our current website, a very cumbersome legacy Drupal system supported by one person who barely knows how it functions.

Do you have personal experience either maintaining or working with community sites? If so, what CMSes lend themselves well to this kind of organization?

Most of the end-users will be very non-technical people. I'm a capable Linux sysadmin with web experience, but I haven't looked at CMSes for large organizations, nor do I really deal with user-friendly sites, being more of a back-end process person.

We want something easy to update with new information, support for podcasts, social media integration, members-only areas, discussion forums, etc.

We're also entertaining the idea of hiring out some of the maintenance itself. Have you worked with any companies that provide services specifically for this kind of organization?

Wordpress getting hacked, need more security

hellodonna — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 08:17:50 -0800

I love wordpress but I am finding that it seems to be very unsecure when it comes to viruses and hacking. What do other Wordpress users do to keep their sites secure and safe? My sites are hosted on Dreamhost and I can't help but wonder if there's something about their one click install that leaves wordpress on their server open to attacks. It's hard keeping up with all the updates that are constantly being issued on wordpress and the plugins and the themes, but I do my best.

I seem to be doing everything right and yet my sites have gotten hacked. Any suggestions? Ideas? What are other people doing?

Can I add a javascript slideshow to my website articles even if Im using a proprietary CMS?

Senor Cardgage — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:49:30 -0800

Can I add a javascript slideshow to my website articles even if Im using a proprietary CMS? I am building my company's (a magazine) website in a proprietary CMS from a company I dont want to name.

The reason I am asking you guys instead of them is because it takes forever to get a satisfactory answer over there and they tend to be steering me towards options Im not always too keen on and that arent as customizable as I'd like them to be.

What I am wondering is, since each article I place thru this CMS allows me to toggle over and mess with the SOURCE to better edit and build the article, is it possible to use a javascript slideshow (like say this one, which I rather like) even though I would probably have to place it manually on every single page?

We are a very photo-heavy magazine and I'd rather not have to minefield these pix throughout each story and this slideshow seems like an elegant solution to that.

A customizable logbook for motel clerks.

By The Grace of God — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 05:55:04 -0800

I've been doing some research for my boss for a fully customizable logging system to be used by a set of front desk clerks at several motels. Thus far Sharepoint and CMSes like Django are what I am coming up with but I thought I would ask the hivemind for ideas. Lots of details are inside. It's not for reservations or to balance/operate cash registers - it's a logbook. It's to record daily take, employee timekeeping/attendance, and periodic events such as pest control, laundry service, and anything else that might happen. Most of these events have money attached - a service provider is paid - but not all. It needs to be simple and easy to train employees on - excel and access forms could do this job, but might be confusing to less computer literate employees.

The employee should log into the system using their personal account, and see a simple, easy to use page with buttons which they can click and a simple form appears where they can enter the relevant data and click OK and then move on to the next task.

The system will record when they come in, the drawer count, going for breaks, and the take at the end of the day. Special activities like pool cleaners, pest control, gardeners and laundry service coming in and being paid, payments from petty cash and the like, etc. need to be recorded as well, and will need their own forms, perhaps on a second page of buttons because they're not used as often.

This needs to be customizable, either by senior staff or by a hired coder at the beginning, and new forms will need to be added and altered as procedures change or new events occur. There need to be fine-tune-able permissions - employees shouldn't be able to see information about the timekeeping of other employees, for example. Senior staff should be able to put notices in the system that an employee can see when he or she logs in - for example, a notice of a fire drill today or a reminder of the arrival of a large convention group.

From the senior staff end, it is important that the data came out in a format that was easily applied to Excel workbooks or Access databases which we can build, or that the software has its own reporting facility built in.

For infrastructure, we've got a network and servers on which to host stuff - Windows or Linux are available but Windows is preferable. Front desk staff computers are Windows. A web based system deployed over an intranet or a server-client system are fine.

For cost, we are willing to spend money on it but would prefer hiring a coder up front to build/customize/implement than a subscription service like Sharepoint, which is really designed for enterprises bigger than this one.

We're looking forward to implementing this - it will help us monitor and assist front desk staff and will save lots of admin time in preparing information for records and accounting!

Perhaps Django or another CMS is likely the way to go, and hiring a coder to set it up for us, but what suggestions have you seen in implementation?

A web-based publishing system for a school?

argybarg — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:58:56 -0800

I like the idea of a content management system for an elementary school, so students can write and publish in a clean system with a back-end database. Help me understand the dimensions of the idea. Currently students at the school (about 500 students) go (infrequently) to a computer lab, type documents in MS Word, save them to various folders on a server and print them. The result is a rubble of work, difficult to manage and impossible to collocate into usable results.

I dream of students sitting down to a login window. They select a project set up by the teacher, and then they see a ridiculously clean, full-screen editor, something like Write Space, with a very few options on the side. For the youngest kids, they might have a few icons to contend with, and perhaps more formatting options for the older kids. There's no saving, no file management, no formatting to contend with.

The teachers (most of whom don't want to muck with technology) pick from among a few presentational templates for the students' work. They'd get help.

The fields the students type into are fields in a database. An admin can pull all the work together by class, by project, by student, by teacher, or combinations. The admin would be able to publish the work to printed reports, possibly to publish to the web, to send in emails, to view on iPads. It has to have flexibility built in.

We have a mix of desktop CPUs in the lab, and some in the classroom. We're also bringing iPads into the process, and there are the computers in students' homes. So I want the front end relying on accepted protocols (HTML5, etc.) and not a proprietary system of software installs.

The database needs to be scalable to potentially swallow up all areas of the process — teacher materials, student data, etc.

I'm a former graphic designer and avid tinkerer with code, currently trying to get up to speed on PHP, MySQL, etc. The tech guys are supportive and strong with server support, network security, and so on. There is no timeline but I drive myself like a maniac when I have a juicy project with many moving parts. So a year or two, building over time?

My questions:

— Where should I point myself? Drupal? WordPress? Homebrew combo of server-side stuff and CSS?
— Are there real-world examples of hyperflexible publishing systems based on Web-standard tools like MySQL and so on?
— If I were to pick a small, strategic spot in the process to bring in a consultant, where would it be?

That's plenty. Many thanks.

Self-hosted Tumblr?

divabat — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:13:46 -0800

Is there a CMS that works much like Tumblr that I can install on my own server space? What I liked about Tumblr was its ease of posting different types of media, allowing for a variety of post types. What I didn't like was its toxic environment and drama, and I eventually left.

I miss the functionality, and would like to recreate it in my own space. I liked how Tumblr automatically added the links to the content and how it made it easy to upload media on the New Post page itself. I'm not too worried about ask/reblog/like at this time.

I hate Wordpress with a passion, greatly prefer Textpattern though am not sure how to get that to work like Tumblr. I'm open to other CMSes.

Need recommendations a custom (?) online video/image portal

brbmaroon — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:54:55 -0800

I work for an advertising company that sells very high profile ad locations. One of the ways we demonstrate value to our advertisers is collecting and showing them examples of their ads appearing incidentally in TV, film, newspapers, etc. I would like to create an online portal for displaying a rolling chronological archive of these video clips and still images. Basically I need to create a CMS archive site or series of youtube-ish-like sites, for a private set of users. The content should NOT be available to the general public, since many of these are copyright protected clips. (We pay royalties for the right to distribute these clips to the small set of people we share them with, and have been authorized to do so.) We will also password protect access the whole site.

I would like to be able to upload a clip or image and enter some basic metadata (channel, program title, circulation, etc.) and have it display when the clips plays or the image is displayed. I would like to be able to upload both videos and photos and have them displayed in chronological order, most recent clips at the top. I need a simple way to upload the content and input metadata (no coding required ideally) since I hope to rely on help from my less tech-savvy coworkers for uploading.

Here’s where it gets a little trickier - we have approximately 20 advertising locations and I often receive a clip that shows several locations in one clip, so I would like to be able to upload the clip and metadata once, and then designate (through checkboxes during the upload process, or tagging with search terms) which of the clip rooms the clip will appear in. Example: If Clip 1 shows ads A and B and Clip 2 shows only ad A, I will upload both clips once, tag clip 1 with A and B and tag Clip 2 with A. When advertiser A logs in, they will see clips 1 and 2, and advertiser B will only see clip 1.

I am open to a solution where there is one portal requiring users to log-in, or where each advertiser gets a unique url. I want to do this the “right” way and could get a decent budget for this if I needed to. I am open to having something built from scratch (seems like overkill) but hoping for a plug-in or script that can be configured once and won't require coding on an ongoing basis.

Considerations:

1) Has to look professional - ideally clean and simple look.

2) What video format/hosting should I use? HTML5? We would like to have the clips viewable on phones, tablets, etc. 

3) Simple uploading and data entry/tagging procedure. 

4) Copyright issues may be a consideration for hosted video solutions, since uploading content like this to sites like Vimeo, etc. violates their terms.

5) Want to be able to integrate both video and still images

Thanks!

We Can Program It For You Wholesale

Magnakai — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:00:06 -0800

Should I knuckle down and learn to use Magento, or is there a friendlier option that will do everything I need? I am building an commerce site for a small business that needs to serve both the general public and their wholesale clientele. I've got some experience with several Wordpress-based ecommerce solutions, but am I going to find them limiting in the long run? The ecommerce side will be fairly traditional. There's going to be a minimum order amount. There are currently something like 120 products, and it grows by approximately 20-30 every year.

The two slightly abnormal things that I need this site to do, when a wholesale customer is logged in:

Show an alternate price.

Give an extra checkout option (of invoicing seperately)

There's also the potential possibility of a subscription-based web service in the next year or so, but we'll worry about that when it happens.

Unfortunately, this precludes the usage of any hosted solution.

Not very complex, and I can easily do it in one of the Wordpress-based plugins. However, I can't shake the nagging feeling that they're all a bit of a fudged solution, which slightly scares me off them. The past feedback on this very site has also been rather off-putting.

So I've also been looking at a dedicated system, which has seemed to boil down to Magento being unanimously declared the bestest. The complicated structure is scaring me off, as I know I don't need a massive unfriendly system, and the admin page will be tough for the client to use. But I feel more confident that it'll handle anything thrown at it.

So there are two things I'm asking:

Should I take the Wordpress ecommerce solutions seriously? If so, are there any that you particularly recommend for my purposes.

Is Magento worth working with for a small business, and does it start to become easier to work with over time? Any recommended resources?