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

.mac

[larry bagina]

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.

.Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Get them an iMac with a .Mac account. It handles all your needs :)

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.

Look around at all the perdy choices

[Zapperlink]

http://www.opensourcecms.com/

Re:You gunna pay for it forever?

[MarkJensen]

Don't buy people things that need money fed into them forever.

Like a computer?

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.

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

PHPnuke ?

[HansF]

Jeez, what is PHPnuke doing mentioned in this post?
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 /. concept.
Bashing PHPnuke in this post sounds too stupid to be true, it's like bashing MySQL for not being a good word processor.

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.