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How to Set Up a Gift Website?
falzbro writes "I'm considering giving my parents their very own website for the holidays. However, it's harder than anticipated to find any type of Content Management System whose intended audience is a computer illiterate family. I personally use Drupal for content and Gallery for photo albums, and frankly can't stand PHPNuke. The only features required would be a blog of sorts and a photo album. I can't be the first one in this predicament, can I?"
The colon in http:// is missing.
;).
We can handle a slashdotting
If you want to give them blog functionality, I'm a big fan of moveable type : http://www.moveabletype.org
I know lots of tech challanged people who use it for their sites.
I know the author has had serious problems with PHPNuke but the PostNuke project branched away from PHPNuke a while back. There are plugins for it to incorporate the Coppermine Gallery amongst others and is very easy to maintain and customise.
http://www.postnuke.com
The MyTh - I am a figment of the Imagination - [Im Probably even not here]
Try Plone. It's easy to install, works right out of the box, and has available blog and photoalbum modules that are easy to install and configure.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Zope is a very powerful, yet friendly content management system. If you ever get beyond the basics of a bunch of text and images, it allows Python scripts. Zope is written using Python. Everything I've seen about it seems pretty nice, and I haven't heard a bad word against it.
Refuse to make a statement in your sig!
Macromedia Contribute is right up your alley. $99 last time I checked. And very idiot proof.
Check it out
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Seriously. iMac, .Mac, iBlog. Done.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
horde.org
Gotta use the CVS code for photo album, etc. but it's pretty stable.
I use WebGUI from PlainBlack Software. It uses Perl/MySQL/Apache.
It is OpenSource, and very easy to use. It has WYSIWYG for those that don't know how to cut/paste. I suggest anyone looking at a CMS to take a look. It isn't perfect, but none really are.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
For my web site, I found that the easiest content management system is Pivot. A friend has also set up a site where his parents can post directly to his web site... It's "grandma proof" (once set up) and easy to maintain..
http://www.opensourcecms.com/
Moveable Type is an excellent solution. Very user friendly with excellent online documentation. It's also easy to set up! I'd totally recommend it, I too have set it up for a few folks that aren't all that computer savvy, and they've had no problem using it to blog. There's also their pay service Typepad that is even more newbie friendly and requires no setup at all! Either of these solutions will do what you need.
If they have a Mac and you have a Gallery get them iPhotoToGallery. Makes publishing from iPhoto to Gallery a snap.
An out of the box experience is important. You can register with Zettai.net or iMeme.net and get root access and Plone installed. http://plone.org/ is the out-of-the-box look and feel. you can customize it, http://plone.org/about/sites -- why Plone? Because its easy, large community and fully standards compliant.
You can see my review of CMSs as a presentation (PDF) here.
Unfortunately just about all open source CMSs leave a lot to be desired in terms of out-of-the-box architecture and usability.
I agree, giving someone a one size fit all content management program with the idea that it will make their online experience a wonderland is absurd. I will just lead to a lot of work and unhappiness.
Personally, I think people are better off playing with a variety of programs. For example, you might try an online gallery with Yahoo, oFoto or those types of programs. Geocities pages are easy to maintain. There's tons of multiuser genealogy sites. If a person wants a simple home page for articles, I would just stick with one of the big blog companies.
The diversity approach gives people a chance to learn what they like and don't like. Online happiness comes from playing with different things. Instead of getting something large in scope, I would look to smaller things.
For example, there is a new railroad tycoon program out, I was thinking of getting that for the paternal unit. I wrote a PHP program so the maternal unit could publish her philosophical thoughts. Even an extremely limited scope web page for parents takes a great deal of work.
You should take a look at Fog Creek's CityDesk. Their "starter edition" is free and lets you publish sites of up to 50 pages.
CityDesk
I have been using the Homebase Anywhere service from Axentra Corporation. They provide IMAP and webmail, 100 megs of web and storage space and your own portal page with webdav access. Photo albums are automatically generated by uploading photos and description files to your "Photos" directory. Other features include compatibility with Mozilla calendar, an LDAP capable address book, and an online web page generator. There is a free 60 day trial. Axentra also sells the Rumba Multifunction Server Appliance, which is a mini-ITX and Linux based internet gateway server which has all of the features of Homebase Anywhere.
Also the .mac site also has other things like update software, sample tunes for your imovies and lots of stuff thats not just a collection of freebies but focused on assisting your mac in ways that are actually productive.
No they dont have cgi, but you dont want that for your case anyhow.
Dont say, well .mac is out of the question cause I dont have a mac or a free .mac site. for illiterates macs a re cheap compared to the training you would have to give these people to be as productive on any other computer. THROW the WIINDOWS machine on the trash and buy a used mac for them on e-bay--it's way cost effective.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
...can be used without paying Apple for .mac. Some of us like a little more control over our domains.
Joel on Software's company, FogCreek, makes a very friendly, easy to use content mgmt software package, named CityDesk.
Very intuitive and easy to use...yet it is pretty powerful. Good for novice and knowledgeable users.
Well, not "all the perdy choices". OpenSourceCMS only shows PHP related apps, but it is an excellent site. You get admin access to all the cms apps they've installed. Do almost anything you want! It's just what I needed last week, while figuring out how to build a custom PHP-based CMS for a client. It's great to be able to try the other solutions first.
I have started using mambo and have found it the easiest installation yet. Upload it, go to your site and the installation routine does all the database for you in just a few screens. You need PHP and MySQL. It is geared for online news/blog/personal site but is scalable for commercial. Once you get the feel for adding articles and such, its a breeze and much more friendly than postnuke and moveable type. Plus, the template system is a cinch (just some include lines for the modules and components). Here is their link.
http://www.mamboserver.com
And my site I set up to keep my family up to date and for some personal musings.
http://www.snappermorgan.com
It is not really a blogger, but it lets your folks write articles with pictures in them, and publish them hitting one button. Unlike most CMS this one is a program in Windows, and archives all files locally. When you hit "Publish" it generates tables of contentes, indexes, etc. and uploads what changed through FTP.
http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/index.html
The starter version, which lets one publish up to 50 articles, is free. Do take a look at it for a nice and easy CMS. Also, for your templates, don't forget to check Open Source Web Desgins -- http://www.oswd.org/ )
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
I was stuck with this same question, a lot of our clients, art gallerys, adult entertainment, etc. all needed self-publishing (basically so they'd leave us, their site designers, alone), I didn't find anything that fit the layout of their sites (I didn't want to change the overall look) so I started writing something that was somewhat flexible in terms of layout.
... really. Nearly done. So that's the only problem with DIY, you have to be fast, or really dedicated. IMHO A content management system is not THAT easy...
All I knew, well, was asp so it's written for IIS, and uses some PHP for file uploads and Graphicsmagic (spawn of ImageMagick) for image manipulation. It works directly with the file system and text files, no database.
If I had to do it over I might say use MySQL but I wanted to make it work pretty much anywhere, and I knew the file system object so... Anyway I started about 9 months ago and it should be finished any day now
closed minded is as closed minded does
sitesage is brain-dead simple. used it for about 4 months for my personal site. free for personal use. the latest release (5.0.8) support wysiwyg editing with mozilla 1.3a or higher
I'm more or less a linux newbie, but I found Gallery to be really easy to set up and host from my home box over my cable connection (with a bit of port forwarding... damn you port-blocking ISP bastards!). If you want to use a commercial host, the requirements for Gallery are pretty minimal. The only non-standard thing required is the netPBM image libraries. It uses a pretty slick mechanism to store serialzed data in text files, so no DB required.
webeasel.net is one example of a content system so easy your grandma can use it. Its a locally produced new product from an up-and-coming tech company in town (Urbana, IL). I don't work there but know people who do.
I should know, I did exactly what you are proposing for my mother last mother's day. She wanted a website where she could share her quilting and craft projects with family and friends...
So I setup QuiltZilla for her. I took me five minutes to get it up and running, and it only took her 10 days and a digital camera to get the first 200 pages of content in the system.
But don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself.
Kwiki is a simple wiki based content management system, that even my mother can use, and it only takes minutes to set up.
Try phpWebSite http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/, I haven't used it myself, but it seems good and people have given me positive reviews.
Thomas
http://www.mac.com/1/mac_faq.html
If your family are using Linux, you're SoL, but from the context of the question (need an idiot-proof solution), I suspect this is not the case.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
Shoot with cannons on pidgeons but if you'd like to have a look at full-blown CMSs give the OpenSource Typo3 a look - after looking through all these phpNuke* siblings which (usually) lack a reasonable user management or real user-definded templates I found typo3 to be scalable, user-friendly and loaded with tons of "extensions" (they call it) for e.g. implementing awstats and such. The learning curve is quite steep but worth dealing with...
-nerbas.
I come from a huge extended family and one of my cousins set up a site on MyFamily.com. It's not perfect and you won't have a lot of control, but it has a ton of features and is pretty easy to use.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.