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A Simple, Family-Oriented CMS?
jbarr asks: "I would like to host a private, family-oriented Content Management System (CMS) that would allow geographically-separated family members to easily share online things like photos, comments, stories, calendars, etc. I would like it to have friendly yet secure front-end and have an easy interface that wouldn't intimidate the less-than computer-savvy. I could always just install and tweak PHP-Nuke and create a family-friendly theme, but is there something else that you would suggest? I would prefer an Open Source solution, as my host is Linux-based."
Not my kind of thing, but that sounds like exactly the feature set of yahoo groups.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
As the owner of GmailTips.com, I'm sure you will appreciate the irony of my post :)
:)
I've known a couple family groups who ended up using Yahoo Groups for this very purpose. It was the cheapest and simplest solution. Do you really want to host a web/email service and provide technical support to your family? (Not that there's anything wrong with that)
I've run two dozen different lists through them for a variety of groups (Work alumni groups, self-help groups for job seekers, geographically dispersed groups, etc). Each time we debated what services to use, Yahoo Groups won out because it had the most complete feature set and was the easiest to use. Nobody really cared about having a full-fledged CMS--they just wanted to be able to post stories, comments via email or the web.
Yahoo Groups is good enough, with a few caveats.
Yahoo groups supports comments & stories as regular old posts, photos & calendars. The group members can receive the posts via email or on the web, which makes it simple if they just want to use their regular email.
It doesn't have a good secure interface, the default login screen is HTTP, but you can log in via HTTPS as well. The groups can be invisible to outsiders, closed to non-subscribers, etc. Not sure if that's what you meant by a 'secure interface'.
The solution is not open-source, it's not something you can custom host, they have ads, and you need a Yahoo account to use the advanced features (I think).
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Mambo. It's pretty much the best thing ever.
I like E107. It's very useful and customizable and has a great theme and plugin developer community.
for me it suits everything from community sites, to corporate sites.
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You could always use it as a way to learn to program , assuming you don't already know. Or if you already can program, those kind of things are always nice to use as a test bed for implementing new technologies that you feel like playing with.
I am currently using Exponent for a development blog of sorts ( Improbable Drive ), and set it up for my girlfriend's personal site who, while computer savvy, has no web skills to speak of.
Setting up a few users and appropriate permissions for the content items (this can be done on a content item-by-item basis) is both simple and should mask away most of the CMS-y bits that would be tricky for non-computer users to use.
It's OSS, and exceptionally easy to set up and use.
It can be found http://www.exponentcms.org.
That green slime had it coming.
Geeklog. Pathetically easy to set up and use, even moreso to administer. Plugins aplenty from squatty.com. And of course you need themes.
PHPNuke is OK, but I've found Geeklog to be a lot cleaner, and the community support is insane[ly good]. For your purposes, comments, stories, and calendars (including per-user calendaring, I believe) is included. There are several plugins that connect Geeklog and Coppermine, Gallery, etc.
Here's what you might like about it:
- It's modular, so the base install is pretty lightweight, but you can add a lot of features. Activating a module is usually as simple as untar'ing it into a directory and switching it on, and maybe running a SQL script.
- Granular user controls. Permissions and interface can be configured at a pretty fine level, so they only see what they need to see. It's easy to have multiple authors on the same site. Also easy to limit content for anonymous users.
- Supports all the stuff you mentioned, either natively, or through native-looking modules. (i.e. you don't need to integrate Gallery).
- Great admin interface. Lots of options are exposed, more than I've ever seen.
- Active and large community... 'nuff said.
A lot of CMSs offer these, but I've been happiest with Drupal's feel and overall ease of use.perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
I think this is up to the end users and not the software. CMS systems are generic enough to be "anything that needs a CMS" oriented.
LiveJournal
Was created by Brad to help his family keep in touch, and at the same time be as user-friendly as possible. Has a bunch of GUI apps that allow posting without ever touching the Web interface.
"Friends" aggregators allows the users to read the stream of postings of the friends they choose to add, so no need to browse 15 journals at once to see whether they added anything new over the past few days.
E-mail notifications, commenting, pictures, etc.
And it's open source.
This would be my first choice to you as well. I would not use php-nuke. If you don't update the modules constantly with php-nuke you will have problems. I have seen more sites hacked due to flaws in php-nuke than any other CMS.
Also, take a look at Post-Nuke. (www.postnuke.com) Another more secure php CMS.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Of all the freeware wiki's I've installed on my testbed server http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/ was the easiest to install and control.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
We setup a Neverwinter Nights server and community site using it and it works pretty well. Alot better than the other AMP bundles or separate systems I tried first. Alot of themes and plugins too.
By "family" I assume that you're using a euphamism for the mafia. In this case you may want to use good encryption, and host the server in a country with weak ties to law enforcement in your native country. Perhaps you should have been more up-front in your request for information.
-- $SIGNATURE
http://drupal.org/
Drupal, an open source content management platform.
Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal can support a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.
Bypass Compulsory Web Registration -- http://bugmenot.com/
Can't go wrong with Drupal, except for the fact that they are temporarily offline.
http://drupal.org/
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OSS Web-based File Management? from 7/7/05
Speak truth to power.
After getting tired of messing with postnuke, I moved our family site to xaraya -- allegedly a much cleaner and more flexible CMS. Yes, it was more flexible, but the learning curve was very steep. In addition, even though there is lots of documentation, the basic stuff that I wanted was rarely there.
So, I did a little checking and very little hacking, and moved the site to Wordpress. I have not regretted the move since. Even though it is first and foremost a blogging tool, it has plugins for pictures (gallery2, coppermine, etc), user restrictions, user levels. In addition the templates are simple enough that it shouldn't be hard to integrate other tools into your site at least visually.
The other plus about Wordpress is that the community is extremely active. There are always new plugins and themes being developed. And if you have a question, the answer is usually in the forums in a matter of hours (that is if it hasn't been answered before)
Free Ipod here
hit OpenSourceCMS and go through the lists - most have online demos available so you can play with them. :)
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Try Drupal [http://drupal.org/%5D it is simple but powerfull CMS/Blog system. With easy user interface (at least I think so) and writen very well (meaning code) - it is clean, object oriented mostly, and modular. The tarball is just half megabyte.
Or maybe go with MediaWiki [http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/%5D it is the engine behind WikiPedia - it uses simple wiki markup, supports images, stories and stuff. Also it has access control, revision control etc. - it should be suitable for such tasks.
And to be honest dont go with anythink with *nuke in name - this is spaghetti code shit. It is very awful for me. Unclean, not modular.
my friend and i wrote exactly what you're talking about for our senior project. dotorg. that will do what you want; it's pretty easy to set up, you can share files, it's easy to secure (uses jaas) and you can write your own plugins for it.
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I've been using Multiply, which does everything you described, and lets me specify my relationships to people, so I can have content that's only available to relatives, or to friends, or to colleagues (or to relatives, their relatives and their relatives, for example.)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Please stay far away from PHPNuke. Not only is a terribly bland and badly designed CMS, but the code is also a complete security nightmare.
You don't want your site hacked by some bored South American teenagers just because you forgot to apply this week's PHP-Nuke band-aid.
I want a CMS I can use to be as dynamic as I want to be on the development side, then with one click, push it up to a website as static pages, so I can host it on a site without scripts. Obviously I'm not looking for a forum, but a blog publisher, one with reasonable CMS features like templates though, not just journal articles.
Anything like that kicking around?
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
I saw a good site that had allowed you to test drive the admin interface of many popular CMS software.
http://www.opensourcecms.com/
Personally, I use e107, but its missing a built in photo gallery. Most family sites want to share pictures. Also the banner ad's are a little weak, and theming could be easier. But all around, I like it better than Drupal.
The last phpnuke I used was hacked in a day, so I stay away from that. If I download the latest you would expect it to have all the security updates, but it doesnt. Easier manual updates would be nice.
Amazing, that no family oriented CMS type software exists.
I'm surprised Plone hasn't been mentioned yet. For a low-volume site it should work very well.
You may want to take a look at Mambo CMS (www.mamboforge.net) It is GNU licensed, and in my experience, a very mature CMS app. There are tons of plugins (including a cool Dreamweaver extension that makes theme-ing pretty easy). I use the blog and gallery plugins for my site and I am very happy with it.
I have also used e107 as well, it is a pretty nice app as well, but Mambo seems to have more features.
I use a slightly modified version of wordpress for my personal site. I didn't have time to write my own, tried a bunch and settled on wordpress for many of the points mentioned above.
It has worked nicely for me.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
This is the site I used to pick out software for myself. Very convenient being able to try so many out in one place.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I'd say install a wiki! Currently, I'm all for using Oddmuse. It's just one Perl script which keeps its stuff in plain files. Yeah, it's not a CMS, but it's the simplest you could possibly want: the flattest learning curve possible. This is valuable when faced with clueless users.
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OpenSourceCMS is not about open source, or CMS for that matter. It is only about PHP. There are PHP non-CMS products, and there are non-open-source PHP apps.
If all you want is PHP, and don't really know if you want a CMS, then the site is fine. But if you really want a comprehensive comparison, look elsewhere. Maybe a site like http://cmsmatrix.org/.
Otherwise you might miss out on top-notch CMS products like Plone and Bricolage.
I don't know if it's exactly what you are looking for, but I use it for similar things.
If you're willing to use PHP, go for CMS Made Simple.
http://www.cmsmadesimple.com/
Leaner, simpler, better than the *-Nuke legions.
A lot easier to use for the average person than Mambo or Drupal.
The community seems pretty good for supporting too.
This site was great when I started reviewing CMS. Basically it nukes the demos every 2 hours (so people can't stuff them up to much) and allows you to do almost anything with them.
From what you've described you may want groupware more than CMS.
My favourite simple CMS is Mambo but that's just me.
http://www.opensourcecms.com/
For pictures: Gallery. Super-easy to use, pretty easy to set up, OSS, and requires a couple OSS (I think) libs (ImageMagick or NetBPM.) Makes nice galleries, good looking thumbnails, and any user (if you allow it) can add comments to pictures.
For content, including calendar: GeekLog. Pretty easy to use (the user model throws me a bit but I haven't spent much time with it since I'm the only user), works a lot like Slashdot (stories, comments, etc.), looks a lot like Slashdot (sections, polls, etc., but gorgeous; I fell in love with the 'clean' theme) and has integration with Gallery. (Or maybe Gallery offers integration with GeekLog. I forget. One or the other, I know it's there, I just haven't used it.) And GeekLog was originally designed to be the weblog for a security site, so it's pretty good in that regard. My GeekLog-backed site is here with the aforementioned 'clean' theme. (Note also that GeekLog ships with only one theme, so even Clean--which used to be a stock theme--has to be downloaded separately.) Look around for tips--many sites (mine included) start off with "how I made this site" as the first story.
Or, if you don't mind having your eggs in someone else's free-as-in-beer basket, Yahoo's services, as others have mentioned, are pretty sweet and easy-to-use, not to mention the availability and bandwidth. (Though they still put ads in the groups, AFAIK.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
WebGUI from Plain Black (http://www.getwebgui.com/ has a number of features in a CMS that bear investigation. It is somewhat of a challenge to set up on a Linux Server, mainly because of the perl library requirements. However there is plenty of help available and WebGUI itself has a fairly long history. So see the WebGUI user community for their comments. I have used WebGUI to set up a church site in which I needed to be able to force login to get to some areas of the church site. I also needed to have individuals in charge of certain ministries be able to change their portion of the website (using just a browser) but restrict them from being able to change other parts of the website. I can also restrict what a given individual sees on the website by simply changing the viewing priviledges on a given page. WebGUI works on a plug-in style architecture so it is highly extensible. Blogs, uploaded user files (including photo libraries) from an individuals web browser are very easy to set up. LW
Maybe not so helpful in your case, but if you all had Macs you could just use iCal and sync everything up with a .mac account.
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