Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with web and CMS

How to send phone pics to a spartan web site via Flickr?

ehamiter — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:16:59 -0800

What's a minimal self-hosted "blog" that hooks into Flickr's API so I can send photos from my camera directly to my web site? Ideally, I want a blog that is not a blog. I don't want tags, or articles, or categories, or spam filters, or any of that stuff. A perfect solution workflow would be this:

I take a picture with my phone
I send it to Flickr via e-mail
Flickr then posts it to my website with no interaction

The ideal layout would be a main site title, and each time I send a photo it appears as the newest one, using the title I typed. There would be maybe 10 photos on the main page. You could access earlier photos by clicking "older" or something like that which would serve as the archives.

I can do this with wordpress, movable type, typepad, etc., but they are all way too huge feature-wise and not what I want. I can also do this with blogger or tumblr, but they are not self-hosted. I tried this recently with textpattern, but the templates and general admin are much too complicated for my needs.

It should be very simple, aesthetics-wise. You could maybe change the color scheme / typography via CSS, but that's about it.

Does something like this exist? For the Flickr hook-in it needs to be a MetaWeblogAPI Enabled Blog or other Flickr-approved application.

Thanks for any suggestions.

I want to build a web site where gamers can converse via video. Where do I begin?

raddevon — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 07:16:08 -0800

I want to build a web site where gamers can converse via video. I'm thinking of something a bit like a Seesmic targeted toward gamers. Where do I start? I'm not a developer, but I can poke around in code a bit on my own. I wouldn't be opposed to using a roll-your-own-social-network solution and doing it all myself as a hobby. I also wouldn't be opposed to hiring a developer off elance and positioning this as a business. I don't really know where to start in either direction. Does anyone have any suggestions? I have experience with Wordpress and Drupal.

What CMS is this?

Finder — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 05:18:48 -0800

I really like the design of this site. Is there a way to find out what CMS they're using? And what's that picture scroller in the middle?

Easy, free way to create a single form-editable web page on my static HTML site?

ManInSuit — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:18:44 -0800

Easy, free way to create a single form-editable web page on my static HTML site? I run a pretty simple web site that I edit myself using Dreamweaver.

There’s a single page on the site that I’d like to be able to have a friend update/edit periodically. The page being edited is a really simply page- no fancy layout or anything.

I’d like my friend to be able to do this editing without having to download any tools or learn anything too complicated– just do it through a web page.

Is there some way to do this that’s free, relatively easy to set up, and easy to use?

I’m imagining something like a free online WYSIWYG html editor that can do FTP. Or some sort of free hosting/blogging service that lets you export pages to another site. Or maybe some clever hack I haven't thought of...

Any tips, ideas, much appreciated.

How can I build a homebrew online music store?

serial_consign — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:30:19 -0800

What are some open source/inexpensive e-commerce solutions for developing a homebrew online music store? I've been charged with designing the site of an independent record label and the only concern I have is their desire for an online record store. They want to sell both physical media and dowloads.

Ideally I'd like to use Drupal for this site as that is my platform of choice. However, I don't have much experience with the e-commerce or ubercart modules and I don't anticipate connecting cart functionality with a music player/browser would be much fun.

Beyond Drupal, I'm curious as to if there are any open source or affordable music oriented e-commerce/cms solutions out there. Since the store will be one of the central features of the site - it may be worth choosing the e-commerce solution first and reconciling the rest of the site design with the limitations of that platform.

Any suggestions as to platforms to investigate would be greatly appreciated.

How do I put an end to this reoccurring CMS/hosting security breach?

serial_consign — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:06:38 -0800

How do I put an end to this reoccurring CMS/hosting security breach? I am using Drupal as a CMS and all my sites are hosted through the same provider. On a few of my installs (version 6.8 - the latest of Drupal) mysterious directorys full of porn and prescription drug HTML pages keeps occuring. Said host said this was due to a security breach in my CMS, which I do believe. How do I stop it though? I delete these folders when I notice inbound traffic in analytics but I want to solve this problem once and for all. If anybody has any advice or experience with this kind of situation please clue me in.

Make my urls purty!

drjimmy11 — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:01:08 -0800

What's the best way for me to create human-readable urls for a Wordpress site? So I've taken a job converting a very static site to one that will use Wordpress as a CMS. A couple of key points up front:

1) We are 100% committed to using Wordpress. Thanks for respecting this.
2) I will NOT be making use of any wordpress theme or allowing users to go to any Wordpress pages at all. We are using it as a CMS on the backend, and on the frontend I will write custom php pages and queries to display what i want to display.

The site as it stands now has 1000s of articles in totally flat html pages. We want to get away from that for obvious reasons. My inclination is to create one page to use over and over again, so where the old url would've been like:

www.thesite.net/article_name.html

the new url would look like:

www.thesite.net/article.php?id=124

two issues with this:
1) the site is quite popular, so a lot of people have probably bookmarked old articles and I dont want those links to die when we remove all the flat html pages.

2) I would prefer people to see human-readable urls rather than ugly querystrings.

My first instinct would be to create a big redirect file (301), sending every old article url to the new format. This addresses point one but not point two, since after the redirect the user would still see the ugly url, right? (if not, please enlighten me!)

My other thought is to use the "ugly" article.php as an include inside a wrapper, so create "article_name.php" which contains nothing but a variable for the article id and a copy of the include which takes in that variable. problems with this are a) we still clutter up our server with 1000s of files, and b) I have non-tech people messing with code and ftp, which i'd rather not.

So, what is the solution? How does mefi get those awesome clean urls like "http://ask.metafilter.com/107722/Batch-Adding-Text-File-Name-to-JPEG-Images"?

I'm guessing "107722" and "Batch-Adding-Text-File-Name-to-JPEG-Images" are some sort of aliases and not literal folders on the server. Is this something automated that is beyond the power of Wordpress? I hope not.

thanks!

Personal Web-Based Backup Interface

perrce — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:16:29 -0800

What would be a good web interface for a personal backup site? I recently read these articles which started making me a little paranoid about losing some files that I rely on frequently. I already have a backup, but I don't have an off-site backup, and I've decided the time has come for one.

My goals for the off-site backup are that they be easily accessible to me (and others I permit) from Linux/Win/Mac with no special software, and that they stay secure from the general public. (Reasonably secure -- we're not talking state secrets or personal information, just documents.) Although I already use and like Amazon S3 and JungleDisk for other purposes, I don't think they are the right tool for this job since I don't want to install JungleDisk everywhere I want to access my files. I also don't want to rely on commercial services like Mozy (et al.) for long-term reliability and privacy. (Call me paranoid.)

So I've pretty much decided that I want to serve these files from a page on my website (via commercial webhosting). The question is, what interface to use? I know I could dump the directory structure to the webserver, and protect it all with an .htaccess file, but in this day of Web 2.0, there's got to be a better interface for this kind of thing. I guess at this point, it would also be useful to know that I'm talking about ~1000 files at a total of ~150MB (yes, Mega). So it's a bunch of relatively small files. (Mostly ODF format from OpenOffice, as well as the occasional .doc or PDF file.)

Can you suggest a web-based CMS/blog/something that would serve as good interface? Bonus points for something that will do automagic backups or syncs from Linux.

(I already saw this similar question, but no one ever answered his question.)

Drupal: How to automatically group users?

l33tpolicywonk — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:36:20 -0800

Drupal: How do I automatically assign users into groups when they register? Is this something I can do with Organic Groups? Profile tags? A different module? Background: I'm using Drupal to build an online course in which each student is assigned an instructor. I want to assign each student an instructor automatically and I want it done so that each instructor has roughly the same number of students (that is, not randomly). The instructor needs an easy way to read comments made only by his students. Is this something I can do with the Organic Groups module? Something I can do with Views? Something I can do with profile tags?

Google-fu for modules has failed me and nothing's happening in my question on Drupal's forums. Come to the rescue, AskMe!

Which framework to use to build a Community website for my family?

mountainfrog — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:24:55 -0800

Looking for community building tool to create a family website. I have family all across the US and would like to create a website where each family member could create their own profile, make posts, share photos. Like a MySpace or Facebook but something more private and to a degree less complex. Something that is just for invited users, something that is easy to use for non-technical users and something that I can host and administer. Open source solutions would be preferred. I have used wordpress, drupal, and joomla but each requires tweaking and modules, and lots of research to setup. Just wondering if there are any prepackages solutions or easier to use modules for WP, drupal, or joomla. Thanks.

An easy-to-change video embed?

johngoren — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:48:25 -0800

Designed a web site for a guy. Short of going whole-hog blog, is there an easy way I can make it so he can log in and change one little YouTube embed (or other bit of HTML) at his convenience? What I mean is, without setting up a blog-style diary or any kind of chronological format...whether there's some tool...almost like Twitter but supporting embedded video...so that he could go in and change a "Video of the Day," without much trouble or without knowing much about HTML.

CMS for a resource website

divabat — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 01:59:19 -0800

What would be the best CMS solution for a blog that I'm trying to expand as a resource/community site? I'm expanding one of my blogs (link in profile) into being more of a resource and community site (since most of my visitors show up Googling for information on certain things).

I'm looking for a CMS that would allow for the following:

* A blog with content contributed by the visitors. Anyone can make a post, which is then held in moderation. The moderators look through it, edit for spelling/clarity, delete spam entries, and post. So similar to the Communities on LJ, except moderators can't edit posts on LJ.

* A directory, with the following subsections:
- Programs
- Organizations
- Grants/Funding
- Volunteering
- People
(this list can grow)
Each sub-section would have different form fields - for example, the Grants would have a close date, while the People listings would have a phone number. There should be an ability to add tags that can be searched across the listings (so any searches for "travel", for example, brings up all the organizations and people and grants related to travel).
The directory should also have a rating system, where people can leave comments.

* A reviews section, for books/websites/other media. A lot of my entries right now are reviews, so I would like my review to be the core information in the entry, followed by people's ratings. I realize I could do a blog entry like this, but I would like a way to integrate title/ISBN/author/purchase link/etc easily.

* Forums

* An events listing, which links back to related blog entries (I was thinking that any entry tagged as "event" would allow for me to enter certain dates and then they'll show up on the events listing by date).

* A file uploads/downloads section.

* Great search capabilities across the site.

* Allowances for monetization (ad space, ecommerce, etc)

There are further ideas, but these are the basics for now.

I've looked at a few CMSes and Joomla seems to be the best bet since it's easier to understand (Drupal's terminology is a bit confusing). I do NOT want to use Wordpress as I am frustrated with their "support". I love Textpattern, but I don't think they allow for this level of flexibility. I'm fine with addons, but would rather not have to code anything myself.

Is this doable? Which CMS would allow me to painlessly do this? Would it be better off for me to hire a web developer to do this? I'm just a sole young person so I don't have the $5000 that's usually the price for these things, and I would rather hire a young person anyway (but I don't know where to find good help.)

Also, because my boyfriend is being a pain about this and insisting that me asking for "CMSes" is somehow limiting my options - what other integrated solutions can I look at? :P

Help me Popup!

doorsfan — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 06:08:11 -0800

JavaScript filter: popups, mouse over, toggle display. HELP - I'm not a developer! New Job and I want to impress...
We use a custom CMS program that allows the addition of JavaScript and my vendor is swamped with our other projects.

1 - I would like to add a basic pop up with text. Nothing fancy but I do want it to scroll and not have an address/navigation bar. It would open from “learn more” text and the window would just have simple text.

2 – (An extension of question 1) instead of the historical click and popup It would be cool to use a mouse over to do this. Same text as above

3 – I also have some pretty long lists that I would like to use a toggle display to hide the contents. Lets say I have a department – HR – and under HR I have 10 forms listed. Instead of the entire list being shown I would only like the list to display if someone clicked “expand”

I’ve googled but haven’t found specifically what I’m looking for (also I guess it’s hard for me to get my head around b/c I do not understand what is doing what in the head section and how to execute the script).

Any ideas for the JavaScript or good web sites that a entry level beginner could use?

Bonus points for good resources on the web or books with prewritten JavaScript that I could reference in the future.

Search engine uses old meta description

clockworkjoe — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:28:10 -0800

Why does my site keep showing up on search engines with out of date met descriptions and keywords? I'm setting up a website for my parents' small press, using Joomla as a CMS. Here it is. http://www.beautifulozarks.com

However, whenever you search beautiful ozarks on Yahoo or Google, you get the the generic Joomla meta description "Joomla - the dynamic portal engine and content management system" instead of the new meta description "Ozark books and photographs on Ozarks history, travel, nature, the Irish Wilderness, and folk culture by Leland & Crystal Payton published by Lens & Pen Press."

It has been several days since I updated the meta description and keywords. Why don't the search engines use the new description? What am I doing wrong?

Looking for an OSX app(or other solution) that will allow us to edit/update a front page produced site.

neilkod — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 09:25:02 -0800

Looking for an OSX app(or other solution) that will allow us to edit/update a Front Page produced site. My wife is a marketing manager at a local hotel. She was tasked with keeping the hotel's site up-to-date. The outdated site was created with front page. We would like to import certain parts of the site, if at all possible. The current site isn't exactly horrible, but the content is years out of date.

As far as I can tell, the site is just static pages - no real functionality. I dont think she's planning on adding any real functionality-this is pretty much display-only.

One of her requirements is to be able to easily update the site-add blurbs for new promotions, partner companies, etc. I'm not sure if she should use an html editor, or a CMS, or any other options. I'm very far removed from the web-development world so what I do know may be out of date. Inexpensive would be good, free is even better.

The hotel is also in the market for a new site host - if any solution requires certain server-side technology, please list it in the reply.

How do I set up a remote website development/maintenance workflow?

namith — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:19:36 -0800

I'm seeking advice on how to mange small website development and maintenance projects with a remote contractor. For a long time, I've been an independent web developer. I do mainly small business 'brochure' sites. Most of the site's that I launch now are on Wordpress (PHP/MySQL) for a simple CMS. I recently started working with a remote contractor to help with my workload. As I result, I'm trying to figure out the best way to manage the development process.

Right now I develop on my local machine and then upload the code and the DB to the 'live' server when the site launches. Once a site launches, I usually end up making updates directly on the server. I know this probably isn't the best practice, but it seems easier then dumping the DB back and forth. For simple, non-DB sites, I usually do edit locally and then just upload the modified files to the live server.

So now I'm starting to work with the contractor and I have a feeling that my workflow could use some improvement. Right now, now when the contractor is editing a site for me, I pass along the FTP details and admin details to access the CMS and usually the details to access PHPMySQL. From there, the contractor logs in as needed and edits the site on the live server.

I have a feeling that I should be using some type of version control system (i.e. subversion). I understand the basics, but I'm still not clear on how it works with DB-driven sites. Usually the files and the DB are getting modified. And then I worry that this is going to be complicated and add time to the process of making relatively straightforward site edits. I really getting hung up on this DB thing. (As a side note, I think it would be rare that the remote contractor and I would be working on a project at the same time.)

So after all that, I guess I'm just looking for some suggestions on how to set up a development/maintenance environment for my scenario. Basically I want to protect the integrity of the sites I manage and limit the access information that must be manually shared in my current scenario.

Thanks!

CMS with vanity domain and ecommerce.

lazaruslong — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:16:31 -0800

I need a CMS that will allow me to do the following: Once I get the page up and running, I'd like to have the option to purchase a vanity domain for my site, preferably on the same hoster I created it on. Barring this functionality, I'd like to be able to eventually migrate the site and it's data to my own domain and hoster.

Also, I need to be able to integrate widgets for online purchasing, flickr photos, and maybe embedded video.

I've looked into a few already, and WordPress certainly looks slick, but it's very important that I have the ecommerce functionality and the ability to have it hosted on a simple ".com" vanity domain.

Anyone have experience in this area able to recommend a good CMS for these purposes?

Content Management Platform w/integrated BitTorrent Tracker?

limon — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 13:07:08 -0800

Is there a simple, themed content management platform with an intergrated BitTorrent tracker module? I know about the planned module for Drupal, but it's not yet actual. Are there any alternatives?

Tonight I'm gonna blog like it's 1993

Kadin2048 — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:26:02 -0800

What blog/CMS software would you recommend that doesn't rely on MySQL or another database backend? So, I finally broke down and bought a vanity domain for myself, and I want to set up a small site there, just to provide occasional updates to my friends and family, and maybe host some other content that I want to share. It's nothing big, I don't expect much/any traffic, and I'm not looking to make money off of it.

I decided to go with Nearly Free Speech for hosting, because they offer a nice metered plan that only charges me for the bandwidth that I actually use, which is cool. But they (quite reasonably) charge extra for SQL processes. So I'd like to find some sort of simple CMS that doesn't require a database to run. PHP4 and CGI (all major languages incl. Perl, Python, Ruby) are both OK.

The only things that have turned up so far are FlatPress, which is a sort of WordPress clone that uses flat files, and Simple PHP Blog. Are there other packages that I'm missing? Has anyone ever used either one? How bad are they to set up? FlatPress seems a little light on documentation...at least compared to regular WordPress, which has a lot of 'Howto'-style documentation because everyone and their cousin seems to use it.

This question last August was about alternatives to popular blog packages that don't require complex coding, but I'm less concerned with that than I am in just avoiding SQL completely.

I don't care about anything very fancy, like the ability to use plugins or customize the style very much. I just want a way of throwing content up onto the site, without having to maintain, organize, and edit a lot of static HTML files. I don't really even care about comments, although they're a plus.

Maybe what I'm looking for really isn't "blog" software. Really, I just want some sort of management system, that avoids the static-HTML morass that I dread from my early-90s experiments with personal web sites. (I used to manage things by keeping a local mirror of the site, adding my content by hand, and then using an FTP client to sync the server's copy. It worked OK, but I want to be able to update from the road, without being tied to the machine with the local mirror.)

Anyway, I'm open to any suggestions, experiences, or anecdotes that folks would like to give.

I've got money to spend here!

alas — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:55:46 -0800

I've looked through most of the AskMe threads on various CMSes, and gotten a lot of good information on free and open source solutions, but I really want to know what I can get if I spend some money! I'm in the unenviable position of moving my organization (a school district) from an ancient, mostly static site to a modern CMS. I should mention that I've asked a similar question before. That was on a much smaller scale, and I went with WordpressMU then. This is a completely different situation, of course.

The re-built site will serve over 20 departments, thousands of employees, and tens of thousands of students and their parents. I love free and open source (or cheap and open source), and have been seriously considering Drupal or ExpressionEngine, but I am in no way against paying for something if it is going to offer more, better, and faster than these solutions right out of the box. What's surprising, though, is how little good information there seems to be on enterprise-level CMSes on the web -- Much less than there is about open source stuff, it would seem, but maybe I've been looking in the wrong places.

Ideally, I would find something that is easy to configure, easy to extend, and easy for end users to understand. I'm also looking to potentially re-use this same system at the various schools in the district, so flexible licensing and theming is a must. Something built with education in mind (courseware?) would be nice, but is not a requirement. Localization, on the other hand, is, as is a workflow/approval process, edit-in-place capabilities, and a LAMP base.

So, is there anything out there, in your experiences, that will serve my needs better than free/open source, or am I better off starting from a free base and contracting modules as-needed?

Thanks so much for the help!

What CMS should I implement in a simple website for a friend?

jmprice — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 09:50:37 -0800

What is the simplest and most accessible free web content management system at this time? [I know this question has been asked dozens of times, but I think it's still relevant since different packages mature at different rates and new software comes along all the time.]

My friend needs a simple vanity site and I agreed to design it for him. Since I'm turning it over to him at the end, I need a CMS that's intuitive enough for him to use. He won't need to create any new pages, he only needs to edit the content already existing ones.

What's the dead-simplest free CMS out there? What do you recommend?

Top Open Source CMS on the web

brokekid — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 12:41:34 -0800

Top open source CMS on the web? I'm interested in developing a community site for a non-profit and I'd really like to use an open source CMS (content management system) that isn't too bulky (Drupal) or too new (Modx). PHP would be nice, probably 100+ profiles, not a lot of bells and whistles, though we will use it to fundraise and possibly sell items...any ideas?

Content Management System Help:

srboisvert — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 02:28:05 -0800

I am looking for a easy to setup and easy to use content management system that will allow members to upload large files for private sharing , allow event listings and commenting and other features. I need it to be easy for the users to do this (non-tech people). I need a free and quick solution - no roll your own time. I've tried Plone and found it to be a poorly documented chaotic mess that requires serious customization to be able to do basic things. Basically, I am about to give up on it out of frustration. I'm considering Drupal but I am not sure how user friendly its back end is for the users creating content.

The big need is to be able to share large files 500Mb to 1GB.

It would be great to have some sort of download tracking.

What's the best solution for an ulta-simple CMS for my clients?

chimmyc — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 19:42:29 -0800

What's the best (and most simple) CMS solution so html-fearing clients can update their site? I think I might have narrowed down my search term to 'Micro CMS', but I'm still not finding what I'm looking for.

Ideally, what I believe I'm looking for would be something like the following:

Login page (clientwebsite.com/admin)
> News
> Content page #1 ('About us' for example)
> Content page #2 (Let's say... 'Links'?)

Most of these sections would basically have add/edit/delete buttons. It seems that on the sites I've done in the past, sections like 'News' don't need something as extensive as Blogger installed (user-entered date and content fields would suffice). It always seems like the bigger systems like Drupal, Joomla, etc. would be way too much for most clients to handle.

Outside of charging for small updates, what options do I have? Hire a programmer once and re-use his or her product? Is there something out there that I'm just not finding?

Bonus: If the system was XML-based and could easily be imported into Flash, all the better

Good form.

aisforal — Fri, 26 May 2006 09:14:11 -0800

How can I easily create web forms? I'm looking for the simplest way of creating multiple web forms. Some sort of CMS? Open Source? I have been using Dreamweaver to adapt templates styled with CSS but it is infuriating me. Of course, I am no Dreamweaver expert, so perhaps I just need a good tutorial (for v8). In my dreams there would be a drag and drop application that would let me layout the form in exactly the way I want. And be free. Or even pay me.