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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?"
you won't have the vanity of familysmith.com, but if your parents have a macintosh, iPhoto does makes web photo journals nice and easy.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Get them an iMac with a .Mac account. It handles all your needs :)
Why not make your own? that way it's exactly how you want it, and it means more as a gift.
If you really want it to be a gift, customize it yourself. Just find a good php script that does each of the things you require, then customize and combine them. Then you can create your own administration interface, or combine the admin interfaces of the individual scripts if possible. I've never found a CMS I liked, as they all seem to try to do too much, and it becomes a pain to customize them due to their massive codebase. And you're wise to stay away from PHPNuke.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Buying someone a service (or a pet) as a gift is, well, stupid is the most positive thing I can think of. Don't buy people things that need money fed into them forever.
If your parents are as computer-unsavvy as you claim, they will not use this. Maybe, with your help, a couple family photos and a minimal blurb of self-awareness "Hey, this is our website and it works!"
After that, it will be as static as if it were etched in a stone tablet. Any updates will be done by you when you're visiting, you'll show them how to update the site, they'll nod and smile, and then it will be etched in stone again until you come back.
Just go ahead and buy them a new clock or a DVD player or a warm blanket. Better than saddling them with something that will be perceived as a responsibility and continual drudgery.
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Jeez, what is PHPnuke doing mentioned in this post? /. concept.
Phpnuke is "a news automated system specially designed to be used in Intranets and Internet. The Administrator has total control of his web site, registered users, and he will have in the hand a powerful assembly of tools to maintain an active and 100% interactive web site using databases."
So it isn't a wiki, it isn't a CMS, and it certainly isn't a blog. It's an open source project loosely based on the
Bashing PHPnuke in this post sounds too stupid to be true, it's like bashing MySQL for not being a good word processor.
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Forget the website. You need a copy of Strunk & White's "Elements of Style" for Christmas. Look up the phrase "run-on sentence."
whatever you say. I figure 99 dollars per year is cheap for a seamless headache free web site. Sue you can cobble together every feature on the .mac site. How much is that all worth to you and maintain? And as for control, well you can keep control on some other web site--thats not what the question was about. it was about how to set op a family web site for newbies.
I find it interesting that no one has suggested Blogger. While other tools are more powerful, for something simple, Blogger seems like the best idea. It is free, they can host it for you if you want, and it's even integrated into the Google toolbar. Nothing seems easier than just telling them to hit the toolbar and type in the window.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Have you considered that giving computer illiterate people their own website may have unpleasant side effects?
For some reason people forget about the simplest security measures, such as publishing their mailing address on one page, and the pictures and names of all their children on another.
After all, only the family is going to see it, right?
If you're going to set them up with a site, sit them down and give them a good lesson on what they should and shouldn't post.
Mac?
Have you considered...
1000's of dollars of new (overpriced) equipment, retraining of the family to use macs, spending 100's of dollars on new software (office) and stiffing the family out on the plethora of windows based games?
Listen up you mac-turds, THINK DIFFERENT!
People always say "get them what you want, what you'd like to get, and you're home safe"...
...which is a load of CRAP! My family has been following that logic for years, and all I get is tasteless crap that they'd love to get for themselves, but I hate and wouldn't ordinarily touch with a ten foot pole.
Consequently: don't get your parents what you'd like to get yourself, or what you think they should have. Get them something they actually want. My guess is that a website/blog is NOT on the top of your their whish list.
P.S.: For those of you who whish to buy ME a gift, you (almost) can't go wrong with Thinkgeek D.S.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!