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?"

Comments

Fix the Drupal link please

[UnConeD]

The colon in http:// is missing.

We can handle a slashdotting ;).

moveabletype

[verch]

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.

Re:moveabletype

[morcego]

Looking at the moveabletype website, I just noticed they saying:

If you just want to get started with a full-featured weblog, we recommend TypePad, our simple weblog service, which is based on the Movable Type engine and requires no installation. TypePad weblogs are easy to customize and offer features like photo albums without requiring you to have a web server or any technical knowledge.

Haven't tried it, but looks like just what you want.

Link

What about PostNuke?

[The_Myth]

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

Re:What about PostNuke?

[javahack]

I was going to make the same recommendation. I set up gallery as a module in PostNuke. I had some problems setting it up as the start page, but it looks like the problem's been corrected in the latest CVS version. (Read more here). I must say I'm impressed with both Gallery and PostNuke, and with a bit of instruction, a non-technical person should be able to administer a website built on a combination of the two.

Plone

[Gunfighter]

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.

Zope

[The Munger]

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.

Re:Zope

[SlightOverdose]

(woops hit submit by mistake)

> First of all its interface is terrible, and extremely hard to customize

Plone, CMF, CE ..... along with thousands of others. Need I say more?

> For instance you can't really just write an HTML page and upload it and hope it will work

Uh... yes you can. And when using a CMF based solution, it automaticall renders it using the default template and stylesheet.

> I've never seen a photo-album plug in, and I expect one would be terriblely difficult

A quick google search turned up quite a few. And if their wasn't, it would be trivial to whip one up in an hour or two.

> Simple scripting is difficult. I wanted to add a simple Python script to a zope site, and there was almost no way to do it

Python scripting is pathetically simple- My Mom could do it. To add a python script, just... add a python script from the content type menu. I dont see how that could be considered hard.

Overall, I think your post is just a big Troll. IMHO Zope is, by far, the most powerfull solution for, well, anything to do with a website. ZPT Leaves ASP and JSP in the dust, and is trivially easy to use. I've trained several people how to use it in a matter of hours.

Re:Zope

[the_rev_matt]

Zope is extremely powerful and flexible. Zope is an application server, it is not the complete solution on it's own. Your best bet for what you want to do is to use zope hosting someplace (I've used hurrah in the past and currently use Zettai, both are great) and get them to install (or do it yourself if you are comfortable with that) either Content Management Framework or plone and add the photo album tool and a blog tool (there are at least three). CMF/Plone provide a very user friendly interface for managing documents, photos, files, etc etc. Plone is built on CMF and basically adds more complex functionality to CMF. You can probably do just fine with the core CMF.

Rolling your own blog tool with BlogFace is pretty straightforward, or you can use one of the custom blog tools (CoreBlog, PABlog*, or CMF WebLog). For a very simplistic blog, you can just use the built in "news" tool.

*I wrote and maintain PABlog, I like it obviously. It doesn't currently work with Plone, CMF WebLog only works with Plone. CoreBlog is the most flexible of the three, as it runs on pure Zope, CMF, or Plone.

if you are made of money...

[TedTschopp]

Macromedia Contribute is right up your alley. $99 last time I checked. And very idiot proof.

Check it out

Try Pivot

[Dugsmyname]

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..

Look around at all the perdy choices

[Zapperlink]

http://www.opensourcecms.com/

Excellent Solution

[shakamojo]

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.

After hours of searching...

[delfstrom]

I've looked into all sorts of content management systems and have tried many of them out.

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.

• Don't use Plone/Zope, Drupal, Slashcode, etc. etc.
• Macromedia Contribute, though $$$$, might be a good solution because you can lock them out from messing around with the site, but there is still a learning curve for newbies
• Good blogging software like MT mentioned earlier would work well, along with something like Gallery for photos.
• Quite frankly, Mac.com seems to be the best out there. It's really easy to use. Of course, you need a Macintosh to make it worthwhile, but it really seems to be a good solution for what you're looking for.

CityDesk

[JacobO]

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

.mac .mac .mac iBlog, Backup, Virex, iPhoto, iDisk

[goombah99]

.mac is so seemless its absurd. With iDisk you almost cannot tell its a remote disk other than the speed. Everything about the user interface just makes it look like its part of the file system and FINDER that you know already. Panther takes it way beyond jaguar and light years beyong Goliath. its just so fast and robust now.

.mac gives you iBlog software, backup software, iPhoto, and home page templates. Of these only the home page templates are primitive, but frankly you dont want to give illiterates to many choices. If they want more they can roll their own web pages.

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.

Re:Look around at all the perdy choices

[Yggdrasil42]

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.

PHP Gallery is hard to beat

[hungryfrog]

I've been using Gallery as an online photo album for a little over a year. It's an absolutely awesome PHP-based tool. Very slick UI, automatic thumbnailing and creation of comfortable screen-size images, plus tie-ins to digital printing services (e.g. Shutterfly). There's even Gallery Remote, which is a nicely done Java app to allow you to drag-and-drop entire batches photos directly into your online galleries. I often have my pics on my site within minutes of returning home.

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.

'Kwiki' is a CMS so easy, even your mother can...

[yoyoboy]

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.

phpWebSite

[thegraham]

Try phpWebSite http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/, I haven't used it myself, but it seems good and people have given me positive reviews.

Thomas