[Synotic]

Hi everyone,

So I'm developing a quick website and I'm at that always annoying CMS part of it. I have looked at both greymatter and wordpress and they are both far more than I need. I'm not really looking for a blog. Just a something that provides a web based interface for content.

I have a news, about, and contact page I'd like to make easily editable. It would be nice if the CMS used something like TinyMCE to make the content visually editable. Ideally it would also have some concept of posts and page collation for the main page. A user can make posts and delete them. But I have no need for comments or saving posts before they're published or anything like that.

Is there anything like I'm looking for? I was almost tempted to use wordpress to be the administrative part of it and then writing a quick and dirty script that read from the RSS feed and showed the appropriate posts/content on the main page. I'm not against this approach, but I think the RSS feed only shows the first 10 or so entries. I also think the RSS feed has summaries instead of full entries.

Help?

[Synotic]

I just found Bloxsom and it's works perfectly.

[indigoimac]

I would honestly take a look at Wordpress.

[besson3c]

Use Wordpress Posts for your news page, Wordpress Pages for your static pages.

[legacyb4]

Have you considered a wiki? PMwiki is text-file based and is pretty darn easy to use.

[Synotic]

I actually installed both greymatter and wordpress yesterday to see how well they would work for what I'm doing. To recap, my goals are:

- To let the owners of the site add brief posts to the front page.
- To let them modify the intro text in 4 other pages without mucking around in the HTML.

My problem with wordpress was that there was just way too much there. It's about 5 mb and hundreds of files. Blosxom is 1 file and 16 kb. I've developed a wordpress site before and you have to build your site around it. I like Blosxom because I just drop in a script and tell it where I'm going to put my entries.

I can see it continuing to be useful whenever I want my clients to be able to edit a few simple pages on a brochure type website. There are a lot of other things I like about it (flavours, simple plug-ins), so I think I'm going to stick with it.

I have very simple needs so I'm using a very simple tool that I can easily integrate into my site. If my needs change, I can change my tools.

[besson3c]

Why don't you just develop your own tool? Attaching TinyMCE to a textarea is extremely easy. It sounds like you just need a few forms and some input validation. If you want something super simple and simplified for your needs, building your own forms might be a worthy option if all existing tools don't pan out.

[Synotic]

I thought about it. Really .

It's simple enough enough to make a tool lets you visually edit text files or links to a database. It would work well enough for the static pages. Doing it for the dynamic post-based pages would be a little more annoying. I would have to implement pagination, view options, templates for the posts, etc... Not incredibly difficult things, but by the time I was done, I basically would have written Blosxom. Its simple plugin functionality and large repository are also appealing. I was able to just drop in the Gruber's Smartypants tool into the plugins folder and a simple script that lets me define authors in a "jack.article.txt" format, which I can pull in the templates.

That said, you still have to edit the entries as text files, which you could see as either good or bad. I personally like the feature. What I might end up doing is writing a simple tool like in my mockup that edits/creates/updates the text files that Blosxom works with. Either edit from your desktop, command line, or the web. Keep the HTML separate from the content. Keep the logic separate from the HTML. I like it!

[transparent]

If you have a little time, you should go over to Open source CMS as they have a lot of working demo you may find helpful.