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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
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 :)
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.
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.
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
Then make up a URL and tell them it's their new home page.
(and that if they want to change it that they'll have to wait till next X-mas.)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I can think of nothing my mother would like more sort of me moving back home with the grandkids so she can have them everyday, in fact she'd prolly just have me ship the kids to her and the wife and I stay away....
If the web site lets her see new pictures and print them, she'd giggle for weeks. The idea is fairly good I wonder if I could host somthing simple enough to allow the rest of the family to upload images, we've had lots of grandkids in the last 18 months. My grandmother can't use the VCR still but she can pop the memory stick from her camera into the printer we got her and her house is flooded with pictures or wee little ones doing cutsie things that only family members would appreciate or care to know about. The scary thought is getting busted for child porn for the shot of little jenny having her first bath or somthing like that...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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/
Sincerely,
Amazon.com Legal Department
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.
Have you considered just getting them socks or chocolate?
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.
...
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.
--> Insert Funny Sig Here
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.
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
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.
So... my g/f Amy, not at all a techie, secretly learned how to set up and use Andromeda, emailed my friends for suggested listening, and surprised me on my birthday with a fully set up music site. It was totally amazing!
She even set up a fake Hotmail address so she could write me with tech support questions. Sneaky.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
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"
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'm going to "third" this suggestion!
.Mac. You get iTunes and the Apple music store (start them out right, instead of trying to pirate music of questionable quality off Kaaza, Morpheus, etc.). And lastly, you get (at least in many major cities) a nice clean, store you can walk into and get a respectable amount of customer service and assistance. (Before you flame me on this one, I'm well aware of some of the horror stories. But *in general*, you're talking about a place that offers regular free training on their popular products, a "genius bar" that's there just so you can ask questions/get help, and more. Beats calling some 800# and waiting on hold for 40 mins.)
I just got home from a LONG day of doing on-site PC service, and the last 3 calls I've struggled with were the same old story. Clueless family orders high-speed Internet access and plugs cable/DSL modem straight into the back of the computer. A month or two later, system has slowed to a crawl and loses connection constantly. Web pages often produce "DNS error" messages. Pop up ads are out of control.
Say what you will about the Mac, but none of this crap happens in the "Mac world". Not only that, but you get photo software that actually downloads images off their digital camera with zero pain and hassle (just plug the thing in and away it goes). You get easy web site creation via
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.
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.
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
Mambo isn't bad. It's certainly pretty simple to use. opensourceCMS has an example of it.